The Blue-Grass Region 
of Kentucky 

AND OTHER KENTUCKY ARTICLES 



BY 

JAMES LANE ALLEN 

ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK AND LONDON 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1899 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

library of CongrM** 
Office of the 

Register of Copyright*, 



IX 



86C0ND COPY, 



Copyright, 1892, 1899. by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 






,d& 



PREFACE 



The articles herein reprinted from Harper's 
and The Cefitury magazines represent work 
done at intervals during the period that the 
author was writing the tales already published 
under the title of Flute and Violin. 

It was his plan that with each descriptive 
article should go a short story dealing with the 
same subject, and this plan was in part wrought 
out. Thus, with the article entitled " Uncle 
Tom at Home " goes the tale entitled " Two 
Gentlemen of Kentucky"; and with the article 
entitled "A Home of the Silent Brotherhood " 
goes the tale entitled " The White Cowl." In 
the same way, there were to be short stories 
severally dealing with the other subjects em- 
braced in this volume. But having in part 
wrought out this plan, the author has let it 
rest — not finally, perhaps, but because in the 
mean time he has found himself engaged with 
other themes. 

J. L. A. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Blue-Grass Region 3 

Uncle Tom at Home 45 

County Court Day in Kentucky 87 

Kentucky Fairs XI 7 

A Home of the Silent Brotherhood .... 149 

Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 181 

Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback . . . 217 

Mountain Passes of the Cumberland .... 249 




ILLUSTRATIONS 



OLD STONE HOMESTEAD 

SHEEP IN WOODLAWN PASTURE 

NEGRO CABINS 

CATTLE IN BLUE-GRASS PASTURE 

HARRODSBURG PIKE 

THE MAMMY 

THE COOK 

THE PREACHER 

COURT-HOUSE SQUARE, LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY 

THE "TICKLER" 

GENTLEMEN OF LEISURE 

HARNESS HORSES 

A FORTNIGHTLY SHAVE 

OLD FERRY AT POINT BURNSIDE 

NATIVE TYPES 

FORD ON THE CUMBERLAND 



. Frontispiece 
Facing p. 6 

14 ""' 
18 
30 
53 
64 
78 
94 
96 

10S / 
132 
166 
218 
228 ' 
274 ' 






THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 



ONE might well name it Saxon grass, so 
much is it at home in Saxon England, 
so like the loveliest landscapes of 
green Saxon England has it made other land- 
scapes on which dwell a kindred race in Amer- 
ica', and so akin is it to the type of nature that 
is peculiarly Saxon : being a hardy, kindly, 
beautiful, nourishing stock ; loving rich lands 
and apt to find out where they lie ; uproot- 
ing inferior aborigines, but stoutly defending 
its new domain against all invaders ; paying 
taxes well, with profits to boot ; thriving best 
in temperate latitudes and checkered sunshine ; 
benevolent to flocks and herds; and allying it- 
self closely to the history of any people whose 
content lies in simple plenty and habitual 
peace — the perfect squire-and-yeoman type of 
grasses. 

In the earliest spring nothing is sooner afield 
to contest possession of the land than the blue- 
grass. Its little green spear-points are the first 



The Blue -Grass Region 



O' 



to pierce the soft rich earth, and array them- 
selves in countless companies over the rolling 
landscapes, while its roots reach out in every di- 
rection for securer foothold. So early does this 
take place, that a late hoar-frost will now and 
then mow all these bristling spear-points down. 
Sometimes a slow-falling sleet will incase each 
emerald blade in glittering silver ; but the sun 
by-and-by melts the silver, leaving the blade 
unhurt. Or a light snowfall will cover tufts 
of it over, making pavilions and colonnades 
with white roofs resting on green pillars. The 
roofs vanish anon, and the columns go on si- 
lently rising. But usually the final rigors' of 
the season prove harmless to the blue -grass. 
One sees it most beautiful in the spring, just 
before the seed stalks have shot upward from 
the flowing tufts, and while the thin, smooth, 
polished blades, having risen to their greatest 
height, are beginning to bend, or break and fall 
over on themselves and their nether fellows 
from sheer luxuriance. The least observant 
eye is now constrained to note that blue-grass 
is the characteristic element of the Kentucky 
turf — the first element of beauty in the Ken- 
tucky landscape. Over the stretches of wood- 
land pasture, over the meadows and the lawns, 
by the edges of turnpike and lane, in the fence 
corners — wherever its seed has been allowed 
4 



The Blue -Grass Region 

to flourish — its spreads a verdure so soft in fold 
and fine in texture, so entrancing by its fresh- 
ness and fertility, that it looks like a deep-ly- 
ing, thick-matted emerald moss. One thinks 
of it, not as some heavy, velvet -like carpet 
spread over the earth, but as some light, seam- 
less veil that has fallen delicately around it, 
and that might be blown away by a passing 
breeze. 

After this you will not see the blue-grass so 
beautiful. The seed ripens in June. Already 
the slender seed stalks have sprung up above 
the uniform green level, bearing on their sum- 
mits the fuzzy, plumy, purplish seed-vessels; 
and save the soft, feathery undulations of 
these as the wind sweeps over them, the beauty 
of the blue-grass is gone. Moreover, certain 
robust and persistent weeds and grasses have 
been growing apace, roughening and diversify- 
ing the sward, so that the vista is less charm- 
ing. During July and August the blue-grass 
lies comparatively inactive, resting from fructi- 
fication, and missing, as well, frequent show- 
ers to temper the sunshine. In seasons of se- 
vere drought it even dies quite away, leaving 
the surface of the earth as bare and brown as 
a winter landscape or arid plain. Where it 
has been closely grazed, one may, in walking 
over it, stir such a dust as one would raise on 
5 



The Blue- Grass Region 

a highway ; and the upturned, half - exposed 
rootlets seem entirely dead. But the moder- 
ated heats and the gentle rains that usually 
come with the passing of summer bring on a 
second vigorous growth, and in the course of 
several weeks the landscape is covered with a 
verdure rivalling the luxuriance of spring. 

There is something incongruous in this mar- 
vellous autumnal rejuvenescence of the blue- 
grass. All nature appears content and rest- 
ing. The grapes on the sunward slopes have 
received their final coloring of purple and 
gold ; the heavy mast is beginning to drop in 
the forest, followed by the silent lapse of rus- 
set and crimson leaves ; the knee-deep after- 
math has paled its green in the waiting au- 
tumn fields ; the plump children are stretch- 
ing out their nut-stained hands towards the 
first happy fire-glow on chill, dark evenings ; 
and the cricket has left the sere, dead garden 
for a winter home at the hearth. Then, lo ! as 
if by some freakish return of the spring to the 
edge of winter the pastures are suddenly as 
fresh and green as those of May. The effect 
on one who has the true landscape passion is 
transporting and bewildering. Such contrasts 
of color it is given one to study nowhere but in 
blue-grass lands. It is as if the seasons were 
met to do some great piece of brocading. 
6 



The Blue -Grass Region 

One sees a new meaning in Poe's melancholy 
thought — the leaves of the many - colored 
grass. 

All winter the blue-grass continues green — 
it is always green, of course, never blue — and it 
even grows a little, except when the ground is 
frozen. Thus, year after year, drawing need- 
ful nourishment from the constantly disinte- 
grating limestone below, flourishes here as no- 
where else in the world this wonderful grass. 

Even while shivering in the bleak winds of 
March, the young lambs frolicked away from 
the distent teats of the ewes, with growing rel- 
ish for its hardy succulence, and by - and - by 
they were taken into market the sooner and 
the fatter for its developing qualities. During 
the long summer, foaming pails of milk and 
bowls of golden butter have testified to the 
Kentucky housewife with what delight the 
cows have ruminated on the stores gathered 
each plentiful day. The Kentucky farmer 
knows that the distant metropolitan beef-eater 
will in time have good reason to thank it for 
yonder winding herd of sleek young steers 
that are softly brushing their rounded sides 
with their long, white, silky tails, while they 
plunge their puffing noses into its depths and 
tear away huge mouthfuls of its inexhaustible 
richness. Thorough - bred sire and dam and 



The Blue -Grass Region 



&' 



foal in paddocks or deeper pastures have drawn 
from it form and quality and organization : 
hardness and solidity of bone, strength of ten- 
don, firmness and elasticity of muscle, power 
of nerve, and capacity of lung. Even the Fal- 
staff porkers, their eyes gleaming with glut- 
tonous enjoyment, have looked to it for the 
shaping of their posthumous hams and the 
padding of their long backbones in depths of 
snowy lard. In winter mules and sheep and 
horses paw away the snow to get at the green 
shoots that lie covered over beneath the full, 
rank growth of autumn, or they find it attrac- 
tive provender in their ricks. For all that live 
upon it, it is perennial and abundant, beautiful 
and beneficent — the first great natural factor 
in the prosperity of the Kentucky people. 
What wonder if the Kentuckian, like the 
Greek of old, should wish to have even his 
paradise well set in grass ; or that, with a 
knowing humor, he should smile at David for 
saying, " He maketh his grass to grow upon 
the mountains," inasmuch as the only grass 
worth speaking of grows on his beloved plain ! 



J 



II 



BUT if grass is the first element in the 
lovely Kentucky landscape, as it must 
be in every other one, by no means 
should it be thought sole or chief. In Dante, 
as Ruskin points out, whenever the country is 
to be beautiful, we come into open air and 
open meadows. Homer places the sirens in a 
meadow when they are to sing. Over the 
blue-grass, therefore, one walks into the open 
air and open meadows of the blue-grass land. 

This has long had reputation for being one 
of the very beautiful spots of the earth, and it 
is worth while to consider those elements of 
natural scenery wherein the beauty consists. 

One might say, first, that the landscape pos- 
sesses what is so very rare even in beautiful 
landscapes — the quality of gracefulness. No- 
where does one encounter vertical lines or 
violent slopes ; nor are there perfectly level 
stretches like those that make the green fields 
monotonous in the Dutch lowlands. The dark, 
9 



The Blue- Grass Region 

finely sifted soil lies deep over the limestone 
hills, filling out their chasms to evenness, and 
rounding their jagged or precipitous edges, 
very much as'a heavy snow at night will leave 
the morning landscape with mitigated rugged- 
ness and softer curves. The long, slow action 
of water has further moulded everything into 
symmetry, so that the low ancient hills de- 
scend to the valleys in exquisite folds and un- 
interrupted slopes. The whole great plain un- 
dulates away league after league towards the 
distant horizon in an endless succession of gen- 
tle convex surfaces — like the easy swing of the 
sea — presenting a panorama of subdued swells 
and retiring surges. Everything in the blue- 
grass country is billowy and afloat. The spirit 
of nature is intermediate between violent en- 
ergy and complete repose ; and the effect of 
this mild activity is kept from monotony by 
the accidental perspective of position, creat- 
ing variety of details. 

One traces this quality of gracefulness in the 
labyrinthine courses of the restful streams, in 
the disposition of forest masses, in the free, un- 
studied succession of meadow, field, and lawn. 
Surely it is just this order of low hill scenery, 
just these buoyant undulations, that should be 
covered with the blue-grass. Had Hawthorne 
ever looked on this landscape when most beau- 
10 



The Blue -Grass Region 

tiful, he could never have said of England that 
"no other country will ever have this charm 
of lovely verdure." 

Characteristically beautiful spots on the 
blue - grass landscape are the woodland past- 
ures. A Kentucky wheat - field, a Kentucky 
meadow, a Kentucky lawn, is but a field, a 
meadow, a lawn, found elsewhere ; but a Ken- 
tucky sylvan slope has a loveliness unique 
and local. Rightly do poets make pre-eminent- 
ly beautiful countries abound in trees. John 
Burroughs, writing with enthusiasm of Eng- 
lish woods, has said that "in midsummer the 
hair of our trees seems to stand on end ; the 
woods have a frightened look, or as if they 
were just recovering from a debauch." This 
is not true of the Kentucky woods, unless it be 
in some season of protracted drought. The 
foliage of the Kentucky trees is not thin nor 
dishevelled, the leaves crowd thick to the very 
ends of the boughs, and spread themselves 
full to the sky, making, where they are close 
together, under-spaces of green gloom scarcely 
shot through by sunbeams. Indeed, one often 
finds here the perfection of tree forms. I 
mean that rare development which brings the 
extremities of the boughs to the very limit of 
the curve that nature intends the tree to de- 
fine as the peculiar shape of its species. Any 



The Blue -Grass Region 

but the most favorable conditions leave the 
outline jagged, faulty, and untrue. Here and 
there over the blue-grass landscape one's eye 
rests on a cone-shaped, or dome-shaped, or in- 
verted pear-shaped, or fan-shaped tree. Nor 
are fulness of leafage and perfection of form 
alone to be noted ; pendency of boughs is an- 
other distinguishing feature. One who loves 
and closely studies trees will note here the com- 
parative absence of woody stiffness. It is ex- 
pected that the willow and the elm should 
droop their branches. Here the same char- 
acteristic strikes you in the wild cherry, the 
maple, and the sycamore — even in great wal- 
nuts and ashes and oaks ; and I have occasion- 
ally discovered exceeding grace of form in 
hackberries (which usually look paralytic and 
as if waiting to hobble away on crutches), in 
locusts, and in the harsh hickories — loved by 
Thoreau. 

But to return to the woodland pastures. 
They are the last vestiges of that unbroken 
primeval forest which, together with cane- 
brakes and pea-vines, covered the face of the 
country when it was first beheld by the pioneers. 
No blue-grass then. In these woods the timber 
has been so cut out that the remaining trees 
often stand clearly revealed in their entire form, 
their far-reaching boughs perhaps not even 



The Blue -Grass Region 

touching those of their nearest neighbor, or in- 
terlacing them with ineffectual fondness. There 
is something pathetic in the sight, and in the 
thought of those innumerable stricken ones that 
in'years agone were dismembered for cord-wood 
and kitchen stoves and the vast fireplaces of 
old-time negro cabins. In the well-kept blue- 
glass pasture undergrowth and weeds are an- 
nually cut down, so that the massive trunks 
are revealed from a distance ; the better be- 
cause the branches seldom are lower than ten 
to twenty feet above the earth. Thus in its 
daily course the sun strikes every point beneath 
the broad branches, and nourishes the blue- 
grass up to the very roots. All savagery, all 
wildness, is taken out of these pastures ; they 
are full of tenderness and repose — of the ut- 
most delicacy and elegance. Over the grace- 
ful earth spreads the flowing green grass, uni- 
form and universal. Above this stand the full, 
swelling trunks — warm browns and pale grays 
— often lichen-flecked or moss-enamelled. Over 
these expand the vast domes and canopies of 
leafage. And falling down upon these comes 
the placid sunshine through a sky of cerulean 
blueness, and past the snowy zones of gleaming 
cloud. The very individuality of the tree comes 
out as it never can in denser places. Always 
the most truly human object in still, voiceless 
13 



The Blue -Grass Region 

nature, it here thrown out its arms to you with 
imploring tenderness, with what Wadsworth 
called "the soft eye -music of slow -waving 
boughs." One cannot travel far in the blue- 
grass country without coming upon one of these 
woodland strips. 

Of the artistic service rendered the landscape 
of this region by other elements of scenery — 
atmosphere and cloud and sky — much might, 
but little will, be said. The atmosphere is 
sometimes crystalline, sometimes full of that 
intense repose of dazzling light which one, with- 
out ever having seen them, knows to be on can- 
vases of Turner. Then, again, it is amber-hued, 
or tinged with soft blue, graduated to purple 
shadows on the horizon. During the greater 
part of the year the cloud-sky is one of strongly 
outlined forms; the great white cumuli drift 
over, with every majesty of design and grace 
of grouping ; but there come, in milder seasons, 
many days when one may see three cloud belts 
in the heavens at the same time, the lowest far, 
far away, and the highest brushing softly, as it 
were, past the very dome of the inviolable blue. 
You turn your eye downward to see the light 
wandering wistfully among the low distant 
hills, and the sweet tremulous shadows cross- 
ing the meadows with timid cadences. It is a. 
beautiful country ; the Kentucky skies are not 
14 



The Blue -Grass Region 

the cold, hard, brilliant, hideous things that so 
many writers on nature style American skies 
(usually meaning New England skies), as con- 
trasted with skies European. They are at times 
ineffably warm in tone and tender in hue, giv- 
ing aerial distances magical and fathomless 
above, and throwing down upon the varied soft 
harmonious greens of the landscape below, upon 
its rich browns and weathered grays and whole 
scheme of terrene colors, a flood of radiance as 
bountiful and transfiguring as it is chastened 
and benign. 

But why make a description of the blue-grass 
region of Kentucky ? What one sees may be 
only what one feels — only intricate affinities 
between nature and self that were developed 
long ago, and have become too deep to be view- 
ed as relations or illusions. What two human 
beings find the same things in the face of a 
third, or in nature's ? Descriptions of scenery 
are notoriously disappointing to those whose 
taste in landscape is different, or who have lit- 
tle or no sentiment for pure landscape beauty. 
So one coming hither might be sorely disap- 
pointed. No mountains ; no strips of distant 
blue gleaming water nor lawny cascades ; no 
grandeur ; no majesty ; no wild picturesque- 
ness. The chords of landscape harmony are 
very simple ; nothing but softness and amenity, 
i5 



The Blue -Grass Region 

grace and repose, delicacy and elegance. One 
might fail at seasons to find even these. This 
is a beautiful country, but not always ; there 
come days when the climate shows as ugly a 
temper as possible. Not a little of the finest 
timber has been lost by storms. The sky is for 
days one great blanket of grewsome gray. In 
winter you laugh with chattering teeth at those 
who call this " the South," the thermometer 
perhaps registering from twelve to fifteen de- 
grees below zero. In summer the name is but 
a half-truth. Only by visiting this region dur- 
ing some lovely season, or by dwelling here 
from year to year, and seeing it in all the humors 
of storm and sunshine, can one love it. 



Ill 



BUT the ideal landscape of daily life must 
not be merely beautiful : it should be 
useful. With what may not the fertility 
of this region be compared ? With the valleys 
of the Schuylkill, the Shenandoah, and the 
Genesee ; with the richest lands of Lombardy 
and Belgium ; with the most fertile districts 
of England. The evidences of this fertility 
are everywhere. Nature, even in those places 
where she has been forced for nearly a hun- 
dred years to bear much at the hands of a not 
always judicious agriculture, unceasingly strug- 
gles to cover herself with bushes of all sorts 
and nameless annual weeds and grasses. Even 
the blue-grass contends in vain for complete 
possession of its freehold. One is forced to 
note, even though without sentiment, the rich 
pageant of transitory wild bloom that will 
force a passage for itself over the landscape : 
firmaments of golden dandelions in the lawns ; 
vast beds of violets, gray and blue, in dim 
b 17 



The Blue -Grass Region 



£>' 



glades ; patches of flaunting sunflowers along 
the road-sides ; purple thistles ; and, of deeper 
purple still and far denser growth, beautiful 
ironweed in the woods ; with many clumps 
of alder bloom, and fast-extending patches of 
perennial blackberry, and groups of delicate 
May - apples, and whole fields of dog - fennel 
and goldenrod. And why mention indomitable 
dock and gigantic poke, burrs and plenteous 
nightshade, and mullein and plantain, with 
dusty gray - green ragweed and thrifty fox- 
tail? — an innumerable company. 

Maize, pumpkins, and beans grow together 
in a field — a triple crop. Nature perfects them 
all, yet must do more. Scarce have the ploughs 
left the furrows before there springs up a varied 
wild growth, and a fourth crop, morning-glo- 
ries, festoon the tall tassels of the Indian-corn 
ere the knife can be laid against the stalk. 
Harvest fields usually have their stubble well 
hidden by a rich, deep aftermath. Garden 
patches, for all that hoe and rake can do, com- 
monly look at last like spots given over to 
weeds and grasses. Sidewalks quickly lose their 
borders. Pavements would soon disappear from 
sight ; the winding of a distant stream through 
the fields can be readily followed by the line 
of vegetation that rushes there to fight for 
life, from the minutest creeping vines to forest 
18 



The Blue -Grass Region 

trees. Every neglected fence corner becomes 
an area for a fresh colony. Leave one of these 
sweet, humanized woodland pastures alone for 
a shore period of years, it runs wild with a 
dense young natural forest ; vines shoot up to 
the tops of the tallest trees, and then tumble 
over in green sprays on the heads of others. 

A kind, true, patient, self-helpful soil if ever 
there was one ! Some of these lands after be- 
ing cultivated, not always scientifically, but 
always without artificial fertilizers, for more 
than three-quarters of a century, are now, if 
properly treated, equal in productiveness to 
the best farming lands of England. The 
farmer from one of these old fields will take 
two different crops in a season. He gets two 
cuttings of clover from a meadow, and has rich 
grazing left. A few counties have at a time 
produced three - fourths of the entire hemp 
product of the United States. The State itself 
has at different times stood first in wheat and 
hemp and Indian-corn and wool and tobacco 
and flax, although half its territory is covered 
with virgin forests. When lands under im- 
proper treatment have become impoverished, 
their productiveness has been restored, not by 
artificial fertilizers, but by simple rotation of 
crops, with nature's help. The soil rests on 
decomposable limestone, which annually gives 
19 



The Blue -Grass Region 

up to it in solution all the essential mineral 
plant food that judicious agriculture needs. 

Soil and air and climate — the entire aggre- 
gate of influences happily co-operative — make 
the finest grazing. The Kentucky horse has 
carried the reputation of the country into 
regions where even the people could never 
have made it known. Your expert in the 
breeding of thoroughbreds will tell you that 
the muscular fibre of the blue-grass animal is 
to that of the Pennsylvania-bred horses as silk 
to cotton, and the texture of his bone, com- 
pared with the latter's, as ivory beside pumice- 
stone. If taken to the Eastern States, in 
twelve generations he is no longer the same 
breed of horse. His blood fertilizes American 
stock the continent over. Jersey cattle brought 
here increase in size. Sires come to Kentucky 
to make themselves and their offspring fa- 
mous. 

The people themselves are a fecund race. 
Out of this State have gone more to enrich 
the citizenship of the nation than all the other 
States together have been able to send into it. 
So at least your loyal-hearted Kentuckian looks 
at the rather delicate subject of inter -State 
migration. By actual measurement the Ken- 
tucky volunteers during the Civil War were 
found to surpass all others (except Tennessee- 



The Blue -Grass Region 



& j 



ans) in height and weight, whether coming 
from the United States or various countries 
of Europe. But for the great-headed Scandi- 
navians, they would have been first, also, in 
circumference around the forehead and occi- 
put. Still, Kentucky has little or no litera- 
ture. 

One element that should be conspicuous in 
fertile countries does not strike the observer 
here — much beautiful water; no other State 
has a frontage of navigable rivers equal to that 
of Kentucky. But there are few limpid, lovely, 
smaller streams. Wonderful springs there are, 
and vast stores of water in the cavernous earth 
below ; but the landscape lacks the charm of 
this element — clear, rushing, musical, abundant. 
The watercourses, ever winding and graceful, 
are apt to be either swollen and turbid or in- 
significant ; of late years the beds seem less 
full also — a change consequent, perhaps, upon 
the denudation of forest lands. In a dry sea- 
son the historic Elkhorn seems little more than 
a ganglion of precarious pools. 



IV 



THE best artists who have painted culti- 
vated ground have always been very- 
careful to limit the area of the crops. 
Undoubtedly the substitution of a more scien- 
tific agriculture for the loose and easy ways of 
primitive husbandry has changed the key-note 
of rural existence from a tender Virgilian sen- 
timent to a coarser strain, and as life becomes 
more unsophisticated it grows less picturesque. 
When the work of the old-time reaper is done 
by a fat man with a flaming face, sitting on a 
cast-iron machine, and smoking a cob pipe, the 
artist will leave the fields. Figures have a ter- 
rible power to destroy sentiment in pure land- 
scape ; so have houses. When one leaves nature, 
pure and simple, in the blue-grass country, he 
must accordingly pick his way circumspectly 
or go amiss in his search for the. beautiful. If 
his taste lead him to desire in landscapes the 
finest evidences of human labor, the high arti- 
ficial finish of a minutely careful civilization, 

22 



The Blue -Grass Region 

he will here find great disappointment. On the 
other hand, if he delight in those exquisite rural 
spots of the Old World with picturesque bits of 
homestead architecture and the perfection of 
horticultural and unobtrusive botanical details, 
he will be no less aggrieved. What he sees 
here is neither the most scientific farming, 
simply economic and utilitarian — raw and rude 
— nor that cultivated desire for the elements in 
nature to be so moulded by the hand of man 
that they will fuse harmoniously and inextri- 
cably with his habitations and his work. 

The whole face of the country is taken up by 
a succession of farms. Each of these, except 
the very small ones, presents to the eye the 
variation of meadow, field, and woodland past- 
ure, together with the homestead and the sur- 
rounding grounds of orchard, garden, and lawn. 
The entire landscape is thus caught in a vast 
net-work of fences. The Kentuckian retains 
his English ancestors' love of enclosures ; but 
the uncertain tenure of estates beyond a single 
generation does not encourage him to make 
them the most durable. One does, indeed, 
notice here and there throughout the country 
stone-walls of blue limestone, that give an as- 
pect of substantial repose and comfortable firm- 
ness to the scenery. But the farmer dreads 
their costliness, even though his own hill-sides 
23 



The Blue -Grass Region 

furnish him an abundant quarry. He knows 
that unless the foundations are laid like those 
of a house, the thawing earth will unsettle them, 
that water, freezing as it trickles through the 
crevices, will force the stones out of their places, 
and that breaches will be made in them by boys 
on a hunt whenever and wherever it shall be 
necessary to get at a lurking or sorely pressed 
hare. It is ludicrously true that the most ter- 
rible destroyer of stone-walls in this country is 
the small boy hunting a hare, with an appe- 
tite for game that knows no geological impedi- 
ment. Therefore one hears of fewer limestone 
fences of late years, some being torn down and 
superseded by plank fences or post-and-rail 
fences, or by the newer barbed-wire fence — an 
economic device that will probably become as 
popular in regions where stone and timber were 
never to be had as in others, like this, where 
timber has been ignorantly, wantonly sacrificed. 
It is a pleasure to know that one of the most 
expensive, and certainly the most hideous, 
fences ever in vogue here is falling into disuse. 
I mean the worm-fence — called worm because 
it wriggled over the landscape like a long brown 
caterpillar, the stakes being the bristles along 
its back, and because it now and then ate up a 
noble walnut-tree close by, or a kingly oak, or 
frightened, trembling ash — a worm that decided 
24 



The Blue -Grass Region 



& j 



the destiny of forests. A pleasure it is, too, to 
come occasionally upon an Osage orange hedge- 
row, which is a green eternal fence. But you 
will not find many of these. It is generally too 
much to ask of an American, even though he 
be a Kentuckian, to wait for a hedge to grow 
and make him a fence. When he takes a notion 
to have a fence, he wants it put up before Sat- 
urday night. 

If the Kentuckian, like the Englishman, is 
fond of fencing himself off, like the Frenchman, 
he loves long, straight roads. You will not 
find elsewhere in America such highways as 
the Kentuckian has constructed over his coun- 
try — broad, smooth, level, white, glistening 
turnpikes of macadamized limestone. It is a 
luxury to drive, and also an expense, as one 
will discover before one has passed through 
many toll - gates. One could travel more 
cheaply on the finest railway on the con- 
tinent. What Richard Grant White thought 
it worth while to record as a rare and interest- 
ing sight — a man on an English highway break- 
ing stones — is no uncommon sight here. All 
limestone for these hundreds of miles of road, 
having been quarried here, there, anywhere, 
and carted and strewn along the road-side, is 
broken by a hammer in the hand. By the 
highway the workman sits — usually an Irish- 
25 



The Blue -Grass Region 

man — pecking away at a long rugged pile as 
though he were good to live for a thousand 
years. Somehow, in patience, he always gets 
to the other end of his hard row. 

One cannot sojourn long without coming to 
conceive an interest in this limestone, and lov- 
ing to meet its rich warm hues on the land- 
scape. It has made a deal of history : lime- 
stone blue -grass, limestone water, limestone 
roads, limestone fences, limestone bridges and 
arches, limestone engineering architecture, 
limestone water-mills, limestone spring-houses 
and homesteads — limestone Kentuckians ! 
Outside of Scripture no people was ever so 
founded on a rock. It might be well to note, 
likewise, that the soil of this region is what 
scientists call sedentary — called so because it 
sits quietly on the rocks, not because the peo- 
ple sit quietly on it. 

Undoubtedly the most picturesque monu- 
ments in the blue-grass county are old stone 
water-mills and old stone homesteads — land- 
marks each for separate trains of ideas that 
run to poetry and to history. The latter, built 
by pioneers or descendants of pioneers, nearly 
a hundred years ago, stand gray with years, 
but good for nameless years to come ; great 
low chimneys, deep little windows, thick walls, 
mighty fireplaces ; situated usually with keen 
26 



The Blue -Grass Region 

discretion on an elevation near a spring, just 
as a Saxon forefather would have placed them 
centuries ago. Haply one will see the water 
of this spring issuing still from a recess in a 
hill-side, with an overhanging ledge of rock — 
the entrance to this cavern being walled across 
and closed with a gate, thus making, according 
to ancient fashion, a simple natural spring- 
house and dairy. 

Something like a feeling of exasperation is 
apt to come over one in turning to the typical 
modern houses. Nowhere, certainly, in rural 
America, are there, within the same area, more 
substantial, comfortable homesteads. They 
are nothing if not spacious and healthful, 
frame or brick, two stories, shingle roofs. 
But they lack characteristic physiognomy ; 
they have no harmony with the landscape, 
nor with each other, nor often with them- 
selves. They are not beautiful when new, 
and can never be beautiful when old ; for the 
beauty of newness and the beauty of oldness 
alike depend on beauty of form and color, 
which here is lacking. One longs for the sight 
of a rural Gothic cottage, which would har- 
monize so well with the order of the scenery, 
or for a light, elegant villa that should over- 
look these light and elegant undulations of a 
beautiful and varied landscape. It must be 
27 



The Blue -Grass Region 



& j 



understood that there are notable exceptions 
to these statements even in the outlying dis- 
tricts of the blue-grass country, and that they 
do not apply to the environs of the towns, nor 
to the towns themselves. 

Nowhere does one see masses of merely 
beautiful things in the country. The slum- 
bering art of interior decoration is usually 
spent upon the parlor. The grounds around 
the houses are not kept in the best order. 
The typical rural Kentucky housewife does 
not seem to have any compelling, controlling 
sense of the beautiful. She invariably con- 
cedes something to beauty, but not enough. 
You will find a show of flowers at the poorest 
houses, though but geranium slips in miscel- 
laneous tins and pottery. But you do not gen- 
erally see around more prosperous homes any 
such parterres or beds as there is money to 
spend on, and time to tend, and grounds to 
justify. 

A like spirit is shown by the ordinary blue- 
grass farmer. His management strikes you 
as not the pink of tidiness, not the model of 
systematic thrift. Exceptions exist — many ex- 
ceptions — but the rule holds good. One can- 
not travel here in summer or autumn without 
observing that weeds flourish where they harm 
and create ugliness ; fences go unrepaired ; 
28 



The Blue -Grass Region 

gates may be found swinging on one hinge. 
He misuses his long-cultivated fields ; he cuts 
down his scant, precious trees. His energy is 
not tireless, his watchfulness not sleepless. 
Why should they be ? Human life here is not 
massed and swarming. The occupation of the 
soil is not close and niggard. The landscape 
is not even compact, much less crowded. 
There is room for more, plenty for more to 
eat. No man here, like the ancient Roman 
praetor, ever decided how often one might, 
without trespass, gather the acorns that fall 
from his neighbors' trees. No woman ever 
went through a blue-grass harvest-field glean- 
ing. Ruth's vocation is unknown. By nature 
the Kentuckian is no rigid economist. By 
birth, education, tradition, and inherited ten- 
dencies he is not a country clout, but a rural 
gentleman. His ideal of life is neither vast 
wealth nor personal distinction, but solid com- 
fort in material conditions, and the material 
conditions are easy : fertility of soil, annual 
excess of production over consumption, com- 
parative thinness of population. So he does 
not brace himself for the tense struggle of life 
as it goes on in centres of fierce territorial 
shoulder- pushing. He can afford to indulge 
his slackness of endeavor. He is neither an 
alert aggressive agriculturist, nor a landscape- 
29 



The Blue -Grass Region 

gardener, nor a purveyor of commodities to 
the green-grocer. If the world wants vegeta- 
bles, let it raise them. He declines to work 
himself to death for other people, though they 
pay him for it. He wife is a lady, not a do- 
mestic laborer ; and it is her privilege, in 
household affairs, placidly to surround herself 
with an abundance which the life-long female 
economists of the North would regard with 
conscientious indignation. 

In truth, there is much evidence to show that 
this park - like country, intersected by many 
beautiful railroads, turnpikes, and shaded pict- 
uresque lanes, will become less and less an ag- 
ricultural district, more and more a region 
of unequalled pasturage, and hence more park- 
like still. One great interest abides here, of 
course — the manufacture of Bourbon whiskey. 
Another interest has only within the last few 
years been developed— the cultivation of to- 
bacco, for which it was formerly thought that 
the blue-grass soils were not adapted. But as 
years go by, the stock interests invite more 
capital, demand more attention, give more 
pleasure— in a word, strike the full chord of 
modern interest by furnishing an unparalleled 
means of speculative profit. 

Forty years ago the most distinguished citi- 
zens of the State were engaged in writing es- 
30 



The Blue -Grass Region 

says and prize papers on scientific agriculture. 
A regular trotting track was not to be found 
in the whole country. Nothing was thought of 
the breeding and training of horses with refer- 
ence to development of greater speed. Pacing 
horses were fashionable ; and two great rivals 
in this gait having been brought together for a 
trial of speed, in lieu of a track, paced a mighty 
race over a river-bottom flat. We have changed 
all that. The gentlemen no longer write their 
essays. Beef won the spurs of knighthood. In 
Kentucky the horse has already been styled the 
first citizen. The great agricultural fairs of the 
State have modified their exhibits with refer- 
ence to him alone, and fifteen or twenty thou- 
sand people give afternoon after afternoon to 
the contemplation of his beauty and his speed. 
His one rival is the thoroughbred, who goes on 
running faster and faster. One of the brief 
code of nine laws for the government of the 
young Kentucky commonwealth that were 
passed in the first legislative assembly ever 
held west of the Alleghanies dealt with the pres- 
ervation of the breed of horses. Nothing was 
said of education. The Kentuckian loves the 
memory of Thomas Jefferson, not forgetting 
that he once ran race-horses. These great in- 
terests, not overlooking the cattle interest, the 
manufacture of whiskey, and the raising of to- 
31 



The Blue -Grass Region 

bacco, will no doubt constitute the future deter- 
mining factors in the history of this country. 
It should not be forgotten, however, that the 
Northern and Eastern palate becomes kindly 
disposed at the bare mention of the many thou- 
sands of turkeys that annually fatten on these 
plains. 



" IN Kentucky," writes Professor Shaler, in 
his recent history, " we shall find nearly 
* pure English blood. It is, moreover, the 
largest body of pure English folk that has, 
speaking generally, been separated from the 
mother-country for two hundred years." They, 
the blue-grass Kentuckians, are the descend- 
ants of those hardy, high-spirited, picked Eng- 
lishmen, largely of the squire and yeoman class, 
whose absorbing passion was not religious dis- 
putation, nor the intellectual purpose of found- 
ing a State, but the ownership of land and 
the pursuits and pleasures of rural life, close to 
the rich soil, and full of its strength and sun- 
light. They have to this day, in a degree per- 
haps equalled by no others living, the race qual- 
ities of their English ancestry and the tastes and 
habitudes of their forefathers. If one knows 
the Saxon nature, and has been a close student 
of Kentucky life and character, stripped bare 
of the accidental circumstances of local environ- 
c 33 



The Blue -Grass Region 



i=>' 



mcnt, he may amuse himself with laying the two 
side by side and comparing the points of essen- 
tial likeness. It is a question whether the Ken- 
tuckian is not more like his English ancestor 
than his New England contemporary. This is 
an old country, as things go in the West. The 
rock formation is very old ; the soil is old ; the 
race qualities here are old. In the Sagas, in 
the Edda, a man must be overbrave. " Let all 
who are not cowards follow me !" cried McGary, 
putting an end to prudent counsel on the eve 
of the battle of the Blue Licks. The Kentuckian 
winced under the implication then, and has 
done it in a thousand instances since. Over- 
bravery ! The idea runs through the pages of 
Kentucky history, drawing them back into the 
centuries of his race. It is this quality of tem- 
per and conception of manhood that has oper- 
ated to build up in the mind of the world the 
figure of the typical Kentuckian. Hawthorne 
conversed with an old man in England who 
told him that the Kentuckians flayed Tecum- 
seh where he fell, and converted his skin into 
razor-strops. Collins, the Kentucky Froissart, 
speaking of Kentucky pioneers, relates of the 
father of one of them that he knocked Wash- 
ington down in a quarrel, and received an apol- 
ogy from the Father of his Country on the fol- 
lowing day. I have mentioned this typical 
34 



The Blue -Grass Region 

Hotspur figure because I knew it would come 
foremost into the mind of the reader whenever 
one began to speak with candor of Kentucky- 
life and character. It was never a true type : 
satire bit always into burlesque along lines of 
coarseness and exaggeration. Much less is it 
true now, except in so far as it describes a kind 
of human being found the world over. 

But I was saying that old race qualities are 
apparent here, because this is a people of Eng- 
lish blood with hereditary agricultural tastes, 
and because it has remained to this day largely 
uncommingled with foreign strains. Here, for 
instance, is the old race conservatism that ex- 
pends itself reverentially on established ways 
and familiar customs. The building of the first 
great turnpike in this country was opposed on 
the ground that it would shut up way-side tav- 
erns, throw wagons and teams out of employ- 
ment, and destroy the market for chickens and 
oats. Prior to that, immigration was discour- 
aged because it would make the already high 
prices of necessary articles so exorbitant that 
the permanent prosperity of the State would 
receive a fatal check. True, however, this op- 
position was not without a certain philosophy ; 
for in those days people went to some distant 
lick for their salt, bought it warm from the 
kettle at seven or eight cents a pound, and 
35 



The Blue -Grass Region 

packed it home on horseback, so that a fourth 
dropped away in bitter water. Coming back 
to the present, the huge yellowish-red stage- 
coach rolls to-day over the marbled roads of the 
blue-grass country. Families may be found 
living exactly where their pioneer ancestors ef- 
fected a heroic settlement — a landed aristocra- 
cy, if there be such in America. Family names 
come down from generation to generation, just 
as a glance at the British peerage will show 
that they were long ago being transmitted in 
kindred families over the sea. One great hon- 
ored name will do nearly as much in Kentucky 
as in England to keep a family in peculiar re- 
spect, after the reason for it has ceased. Here 
is that old invincible race ideal of personal lib- 
erty, and that old, unreckoning, truculent, ani- 
mal rage at whatever infringes on it. The 
Kentuckians were among the very earliest to 
grant manhood suffrage. Nowhere in this 
country are the rights of property more invio- 
lable, the violations of these more surely pun- 
ished : neither counsel nor judge nor any power 
whatsoever can acquit a man who has taken 
fourpence of his neighbor's goods. Here is the 
old land -loving, land -holding, home -staying, 
home - defending disposition. This is not the 
lunching, tourist race that, to Mr. Ruskin's 
horror, leaves its crumbs and chicken-bones on 
36 



The Blue -Grass Region 

the glaciers. The simple rural key-note of life 
is still the sweetest. Now, after the lapse of 
more than a century, the most populous town 
contains less than twenty thousand white souls. 
Along with the love of land has gone compara- 
tive content with the annual increase of flock 
and field. No man among them has ever got 
immense wealth. Here is the old sense of per- 
sonal privacy and reserve which has for cen- 
turies intrenched the Englishman in the heart 
of his estate, and forced him to regard with in- 
expugnable discomfort his neighbor's bounda- 
ries. This would have been a densely peopled 
region, the farms would have been minutely 
subdivided, had sons asked and received per- 
mission to settle on parts of the ancestral estate. 
This filling in and too close personal contact 
would have satisfied neither father nor child, 
so that the one has generally kept his acres in- 
tact, and the other, impelled by the same land- 
hunger that brought his pioneer forefather 
hither, has gone hence into the younger West, 
where lie broader tracts and vaster spaces. Here 
is the old idea, somewhat current still in Eng- 
land, that the highest mark of the gentleman 
is not cultivation of the mind, not intellect, not 
knowledge, but elegant living. Here is the old 
hereditary devotion to the idea of the State. 
Write the biographies of the Kentuckians who 
37 



The Blue -Grass Region 

have been engaged in national or in local poli- 
tics, and you have largely the history of the 
State of Kentucky. Write the lives of all its 
scientists, artists, musicians, actors, poets, nov- 
elists, and you find many weary mile-stones be- 
tween the chapters. 

Enter the blue-grass region from what point 
you choose — and you may do this, so well 
traversed is it by railways — and you become 
sensitive to its influence. If you come from 
the North or the East, you say : "This is not 
modern America. Here is something local 
and unique. For one thing, nothing goes fast 
here." By-and-by you see a blue-grass race- 
horse, and note an exception. But you do not 
also except the rider or the driver. The speed 
is not his. He is a mere bunch of mistletoe to 
the horse. Detach him, and he is not worth 
timing. Human speed for the most part lies 
fallow. Every man starts for the goal of life 
at his own natural gait, and if he sees that it 
is too far off for him to reach it in a lifetime, 
he does not run the faster, but has the goal 
moved nearer him. The Kentuckians are not 
provincial. As Thoreau said, no people can 
long remain provincial who have a propensity 
for politics, whittling, and rapid travelling. 
They are not inaccessible to modern ideas, 
but the shock of modern ideas has not elec- 
38 



The Blue -Grass Region 

trifled them. They have walled themselves 
around with old race instincts and habitudes, 
and when the stream of tendency rushes 
against this wall, it recoils upon itself instead 
of sweeping away the barrier. 

The typical Kentuckian regards himself an 
American of the Americans, and thinks as lit- 
tle of being like the English as he would of 
imitating the Jutes. In nothing is he more 
like his transatlantic ancestry than in strong 
self -content. He sits on his farm as though 
it were the pole of the heavens — a manly 
man with a heart in him. Usually of the 
blond type, robust, well formed, with clear, 
fair complexion, that grows ruddier with age 
and stomachic development, full neck, and an 
open, kind, untroubled countenance. He is 
frank, but not familiar ; talkative, but not 
garrulous ; full of the genial humor of local 
hits and allusions, but without a subtle nim- 
bleness of wit ; indulgent towards purely mas- 
culine vices, but intolerant of petty crimes ; 
no reader of books nor master in religious de- 
bate, faith coming to him as naturally as his 
appetite, and growing with what it feeds upon ; 
loving roast pig, but not caring particularly 
for Lamb's eulogy ; loving his grass like a 
Greek, not because it is beautiful, but because 
it is fresh and green ; a peaceful man with 
39 



The Blue -Grass Region 

strong passions, and so to be heartily loved 
and respected or heartily hated and respected, 
but never despised or trifled with. An occa- 
sional barbecue in the woods, where the sad- 
dles of South Down mutton are roasted on 
spits over the coals of the mighty trench, and 
the steaming kettles of burgoo lend their savor 
to the nose of the hungry political orator, so 
that he becomes all the more impetuous in his 
invectives ; the great agricultural fairs ; the 
race-courses ; the monthly county court day, 
when he meets his neighbors on the public 
square of the nearest town ; the quiet Sunday 
mornings, when he meets them again for rather 
more clandestine talks at the front door of the 
neighborhood church — these and his own fire- 
side are his characteristic and ample pleasures. 
You will never be under his roof without be- 
ing touched by the mellowest of all the virtues 
of his race — simple, unsparing human kindness 
and hospitality. 

The women of Kentucky have long had rep- 
utation for beauty. An average type is a re- 
finement on the English blonde — greater deli- 
cacy of form, feature, and color. A beautiful 
Kentucky woman is apt to be exceedingly 
beautiful. Her voice is low and soft ; her 
hands and feet delicately formed ; her skin 
pure and beautiful in tint and shading ; her 
40 



The Blue -Grass Region 

eyes blue or brown, and hair nut brown or 
golden brown ; to all which is added a cer- 
tain unapproachable refinement. It must not 
for a moment be supposed, however, that there 
are not many genuinely ugly women in Ken- 
tucky. 



UNCLE TOM AT HOME 



I 



ON the outskirts of the towns of central 
Kentucky, a stranger, searching for the 
picturesque in architecture and in life, 
would find his attention arrested by certain 
masses of low frame and brick structures, and 
by the multitudes of strange human beings that 
inhabit them. A single town may have on its 
edges several of these settlements, which are 
themselves called " towns," and bear separate 
names either descriptive of some topographical 
peculiarity or taken from the original owners 
of the lots. It is in these that a great part of 
the negro population of Kentucky has packed 
itself since the war. Here live the slaves of the 
past with their descendants ; old family ser- 
vants from the once populous country places ; 
old wagon-drivers from the deep-rutted lanes ; 
old wood-choppers from the slaughtered blue- 
grass forests ; old harvesters and ploughmen 
from the long since abandoned fields ; old cooks 
from the savory, wasteful kitchens ; old nurses 
45 



Uncle Tom at Home 

from the softly rocked and softly sung-to cra- 
dles. Here, too, are the homes of the younger 
generation, of the laundresses and the barbers, 
teachers and ministers of the gospel, coachmen 
and porters, restaurant-keepers and vagabonds, 
hands from the hemp factories, and workmen 
on the outlying farms. 

You step easily from the verge of the white 
population to the confines of the black. But it 
is a great distance — like the crossing of a vast 
continent between the habitats of alien races. 
The air seems all at once to tan the cheek. Out 
of the cold, blue recesses of the midsummer sky 
the sun burns with a fierceness of heat that 
warps the shingles of the pointed roofs and 
flares with blinding brilliancy against some 
whitewashed wall. Perhaps in all the street 
no little cooling stretch of shade. The un- 
paved sidewalks and the roadway between are 
but undistinguishable parts of a common thor- 
oughfare, along which every upspringing green 
thing is quickly trodden to death beneath the 
ubiquitous play and passing of many feet. Here 
and there, from some shielded nook or other 
coign of vantage, a single plumy branch of 
dog -fennel may be seen spreading its small 
firmament of white and golden stars close to 
the ground ; or between its pale green stalks 
the faint lavender of the nightshade will take 
46 



Uncle Tom at Home 

the eye as the sole emblem of the flowering 
world. 

A negro town ! Looking out the doors and 
windows of the cabins, lounging in the door- 
ways, leaning over the low frame fences, gath- 
ering into quickly forming, quickly dissolving 
groups in the dusty streets, they swarm. They 
are here from milk-white through all deep- 
ening shades to glossy blackness ; octoroons, 
quadroons, mulattoes — some with large liquid 
black eyes, refined features, delicate forms ; 
working, gossiping, higgling over prices around 
a vegetable cart, discussing last night's church 
festival, to-day's funeral, or next week's railway 
excursion, sleeping, planning how to get work 
and how to escape it. From some unseen old 
figure in flamboyant turban, bending over the 
wash-tub in the rear of a cabin, comes a crooned 
song of indescribable pathos ; behind a half- 
closed front shutter, a Moorish-hued amoroso in 
gay linen thrums his banjo in a measure of 
ecstatic gayety preluding the more passionate 
melodies of the coming night. Here a fight ; 
there the sound of the fiddle and the rhythmic 
patting of hands. Tatters and silks flaunt them- 
selves side by side. Dirt and cleanliness lie 
down together. Indolence goes hand in hand 
with thrift. Superstition dogs the slow foot- 
steps of reason. Passion and self-control eye 
47 



Uncle Tom at Home 

each other across the narrow way. If there is 
anywhere resolute virtue, round it is a weltered 
muck of low and sensual desire. One sees the 
surviving types of old negro life here crowded 
together with and contrasted with the new 
phases of "colored" life — sees the transitional 
stage of a race, part of whom were born slaves 
and are now freemen, part of whom have been 
born freemen but remain so much like slaves. 

It cannot fail to happen, as you walk along, 
that you will come upon some cabin set back 
in a small yard and half hidden, front and side, 
by an almost tropical jungle of vines and mul- 
tiform foliage ; patches of great sunflowers, 
never more leonine in tawny magnificence and 
sun-loving repose; festoons of white and pur- 
ple morning-glories over the windows and up 
to the low eaves ; around the porch and above 
the door-way, a trellis of gourd-vines swing- 
ing their long-necked, grotesque yellow fruit ; 
about the entrance flaming hollyhocks and oth- 
er brilliant bits of bloom, marigolds and petu- 
nias — evidences of the warm, native taste that 
still distinguishes the negro after some centu- 
ries of contact with the cold, chastened ideals 
of the Anglo-Saxon. 

In the door-way of such a cabin, sheltered 
from the afternoon sun by his dense jungle of 
vines, but with a few rays of light glinting 
43 



Uncle Tom at Home 

through the fluttering leaves across his seamed 
black face and white woolly head, the muscles 
of his once powerful arms shrunken, the gnarl- 
ed hands folded idly in his lap — his occupation 
gone — you will haply see some old-time slave 
of the class of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom. For 
it is true that scattered here and there through- 
out the negro towns of Kentucky are represent- 
atives of the same class that furnished her with 
her hero ; true, also, that they were never sold 
by their Kentucky masters to the plantations 
of the South, but remained unsold down to the 
last days of slavery. 

When the war scattered the negroes of Ken- 
tucky blindly, tumultuously, hither and thither, 
many of them gathered the members of their 
families about them and moved from the coun- 
try into these " towns " ; and here the few sur- 
vivors live, ready to testify of their relations 
with their former masters and mistresses, and 
indirectly serving to point a great moral : that, 
however justly Mrs. Stowe may have chosen 
one of their number as best fitted to show the 
fairest aspects of domestic slavery in the United 
States, she departed from the common truth of 
history, as it respected their lot in life, when 
she condemned her Uncle Tom to his tragical 
fate. For it was not the character of Uncle 
Tom that she greatly idealized, as has been so 
d 49 



Uncle Tom at Home 

often asserted ; it was the category of events 
that were made to befall him. 

As citizens of the American Republic, these 
old negroes — now known as "colored gentle- 
men," surrounded by " colored ladies and gentle- 
men " — have not done a great deal. The bud 
of liberty was ingrafted too late on the ancient 
slave-stock to bear much fruit. But they are 
interesting, as contemporaries of a type of Ken- 
tucky negro whose virtues and whose sorrows, 
dramatically embodied in literature, have be- 
come a by-word throughout the civilized world. 
And now that the war - cloud is lifting from 
over the landscape of the past, so that it lies 
still clear to the eyes of those who were once 
the dwellers amid its scenes, it is perhaps a 
good time to scan it and note some of its great 
moral landmarks before it grows remoter and 
is finally forgotten. 



II 



THESE three types— Mrs. Stowe's Uncle 
Tom, and the Shelbys, his master and 
mistress — were the outgrowth of nat- 
ural and historic conditions peculiar to Ken- 
tucky. " Perhaps," wrote Mrs. Stowe in her 
novel, " the mildest form of the system of sla- 
very is to be seen in the State of Kentucky. 
The general prevalence of agricultural pursuits 
of a quiet and gradual nature, not requiring 
those periodic seasons of hurry and pressure 
that are called for in the business of more 
southern districts, makes the task of the negro 
a more healthful and reasonable one ; while 
the master, content with a more gradual style 
of acquisition, had not those temptations to 
hard-heartedness which always overcome frail 
human nature when the prospect of sudden and 
rapid gain is weighed in the balance with no 
heavier counterpoise than the interests of the 
helpless and unprotected." These words con- 
tain many truths. 

5i 



Uncle Tom at Home 

For it must not be forgotten, first of all, that 
the condition of the slave in Kentucky was 
measurably determined by certain physical 
laws which lay beyond the control of the 
most inhuman master. Consider the nature 
of the country — elevated, rolling, without mi- 
asmatic districts or fatal swamps ; the soil in 
the main slave-holding portions of the State 
easily tilled, abundantly yielding ; the climate 
temperate and invigorating. Consider the sys- 
tem of agriculture — not that of vast planta- 
tions, but of small farms, part of which regu- 
larly consisted of woodland and meadow that 
required little attention. Consider the further 
limitations to this system imposed by the range 
of the great Kentucky staples — it being in the 
nature of corn, wheat, hemp, and tobacco, not 
to yield profits sufficient to justify the employ- 
ment of an immense predial force, nor to re- 
quire seasons of forced and exhausting labor. 
It is evident that under such conditions slavery 
was not stamped with those sadder features 
which it wore beneath a devastating sun, amid 
unhealthy or sterile regions of country, and 
through the herding together of hundreds of 
slaves who had the outward but not the inward 
discipline of an army. True, one recalls here 
the often quoted words of Jefferson on the 
raising of tobacco — words nearly as often mis- 



Uncle Tom at Home 

applied as quoted ; for he was considering the 
condition of slaves who were unmercifully 
worked on exhausted lands by a certain prole- 
tarian type of master, who did not feed and 
clothe them. Only under such circumstances 
could the culture of this plant be described as 
"productive of infinite wretchedness," and 
those engaged in it as " in a continual state of 
exertion beyond the powers of nature to sup- 
port." It was by reason of these physical facts 
that slavery in Kentucky assumed the phase 
which is to be distinguished as domestic ; and 
it was this mode that had prevailed at the 
North and made emancipation easy. 

Furthermore, in all history the condition of 
an enslaved race under the enslaving one has 
been partly determined by the degree of moral 
justification with which the latter has regarded 
the subject of human bondage ; and the life of 
the Kentucky negro, say in the days of Uncle 
Tom, was further modified by the body of laws 
which had crystallized as the sentiment of the 
people, slave - holders themselves. But even 
these laws were only a partial exponent of 
what that sentiment was ; for some of the se- 
verest were practically a dead letter, and the 
clemency of the negro's treatment by the pre- 
vailing type of master made amends for the 
hard provisions of others. 
53 



Uncle Tom at Home 

It would be a difficult thing to write the his- 
tory of slavery in Kentucky. It is impossible 
to write a single page of it here. But it may 
be said that the conscience of the great body 
of the people was always sensitive touching 
the rightfulness of the institution. At the 
very outset it seems to have been recognized 
simply for the reason that the early settlers 
were emigrants from slave-holding States and 
brought their negroes with them. The com- 
monwealth began its legislation on the sub- 
ject in the face of an opposing sentiment. 
By early statute restriction was placed on 
the importation of slaves, and from the first 
they began to be emancipated. Through- 
out the seventy -five years of pro -slavery 
State life, the general conscience was always 
troubled. 

The churches took up the matter. Great 
preachers, whose names were influential beyond 
the State, denounced the system from the pul- 
pit, pleaded for the humane and Christian 
treatment of slaves, advocated gradual eman- 
cipation. One religious body after another 
proclaimed the moral evil of it, and urged that 
the young be taught and prepared as soon as 
possible for freedom. Antislavery publications 
and addresses, together with the bold words of 
great political leaders, acted as a further leaven 
54 



Uncle Tom at Home 

in the mind of the slave-holding class. As evi- 
dence of this, when the new constitution of the 
State was to be adopted, about 1850, thirty 
thousand votes were cast in favor of an open 
clause in it, whereby gradual emancipation 
should become a law as soon as the majority of 
the citizens should deem it expedient for the 
peace of society ; and these votes represented 
the richest, most intelligent slave - holders in 
the State. 

In general the laws were perhaps the mildest. 
Some it is vital to the subject not to pass over. 
If slaves were inhumanly treated by their own- 
er or not supplied with proper food and cloth- 
ing, they could be taken from him and sold to 
a better master. This law was not inoperative. 
I have in mind the instance of a family who 
lost their negroes in this way, were socially dis- 
graced, and left their neighborhood. If the 
owner of a slave had bought him on condition 
of not selling him out of the county, or into the 
Southern States, or so as not to separate him 
from his family, he could be sued for violation 
of contract. This law shows the opposition of 
the better class of Kentucky masters to the 
slave-trade, and their peculiar regard for the 
family ties of their negroes. In the earliest 
Kentucky newspapers will be found advertise- 
ments of the sales of negroes, on condition that 
55 



Uncle Tom at Home 

they would be bought and kept within the 
county or the State. It was within chancery 
jurisdiction to prevent the separation of fami- 
lies. The case may be mentioned of a master 
who was tried by his Church for unnecessarily 
separating a husband from his wife. Some- 
times slaves who had been liberated and had 
gone to Canada voluntarily returned into ser- 
vice under their former masters. Lest these 
should be overreached, they were to be taken 
aside and examined by the court to see that 
they understood the consequences of their 
own action, and were free from improper con- 
straint. On the other hand, if a slave had 
a right to his freedom, he could file a bill 
in chancery and enforce his master's assent 
thereto. 

But a clear distinction must be made between 
the mild view entertained by the Kentucky 
slave-holders regarding the system itself and 
their dislike of the agitators of forcible and im- 
mediate emancipation. A community of mas- 
ters, themselves humane to their negroes and 
probably intending to liberate them in the end, 
would yet combine into a mob to put down in- 
dividual or organized antislavery efforts, be- 
cause they resented what they regarded as in- 
terference of the abolitionist with their own 
affairs, and believed his measures inexpedient 
56 



Uncle Tom at Home 

for the peace of society. Therefore, the history 
of the antislavery movement in Kentucky, at 
times so turbulent, must not be used to show 
the sentiment of the people regarding slavery 
itself. 



Ill 



FROM these general considerations it is 
possible to enter more closely upon a 
study of the domestic life and relations 
of Uncle Tom and the Shelbys. 

"Whoever visits some estates there," wrote 
Mrs. Stowe, " and witnesses the good-humored 
indulgence of some masters and mistresses and 
the affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might 
be tempted to dream of the oft-fabled poetic 
legend of a patriarchal institution." Along 
with these words, taken from Uncle Tom's Cab- 
in, I should like to quote an extract from a let- 
ter written me by Mrs. Stowe under date of 
April 30, 1886 : 

" In relation to your letter, I would say that I never 
lived in Kentucky, but spent many years in Cincinnati, 
which is separated from Kentucky only by the Ohio 
River, which, as a shrewd politician remarked, was dry 
one-half the year and frozen the other. My father 
was president of a theological seminary at Walnut 
Hills, near Cincinnati, and with him I travelled and 
58 




THE MAMMY 



Uncle Tom at Home 

visited somewhat extensively in Kentucky, and there 
became acquainted with those excellent slave-holders 
delineated in Uncle Toms Cabin. I saw many coun- 
terparts of the Shelbys — people humane, conscien- 
tious, just and generous, who regarded slavery as an 
evil and were anxiously considering their duties to the 
slave. But it was not till I had finally left the West, 
and my husband was settled as professor in Bowdoin 
College, Brunswick, Maine, that the passage of the 
fugitive-slave law and the distresses that followed it 
drew this from me." 

The typical boy on a Kentucky farm was ten- 
derly associated from infancy with the negroes 
of the household and the fields. His old black 
" Mammy " became almost his first mother, and 
was but slowly crowded out of his conscience 
and his heart by the growing image of the true 
one. She had perhaps nursed him at her bosom 
when he was not long enough to stretch across 
it, sung over his cradle at noon and at midnight, 
taken him out upon the velvety grass beneath 
the shade of the elm-trees to watch his first 
manly resolution of standing alone in the world 
and walking the vast distance of some inches. 
Often, in boyish years, when flying from the 
house with a loud appeal from the incompre- 
hensible code of Anglo-Saxon punishment for 
small misdemeanors, he had run to those black 
arms and cried himself to sleep in the lap of 
59 



Uncle Tom at Home 

African sympathy. As he grew older, alas ! his 
first love grew faithless ; and while " Mammy" 
was good enough in her way and sphere, his 
wandering affections settled humbly at the feet 
of another great functionary of the household 
— the cook in the kitchen. To him her keys 
were as the keys to the kingdom of heaven, for 
his immortal soul was his immortal appetite. 
When he stood by the biscuit bench while she, 
pausing amid the varied industries that went 
into the preparation of an old-time Kentucky 
supper, made him marvellous geese of dough, 
with farinaceous feathers and genuine coffee- 
grains for eyes, there was to him no other artist 
in the world who possessed the secret of so com- 
mingling the useful with the beautiful. 

The little half-naked imps, too, playing in the 
dirt like glossy blackbirds taking a bath of dust, 
were his sweetest, because perhaps his forbid- 
den, companions. With them he went clan- 
destinely to the fatal duck-pond in the stable 
lot, to learn the art of swimming on a walnut 
rail. With them he raced up and down the 
lane on blooded alder-stalk horses, afterwards 
leading the exhausted coursers into stables of 
green bushes and haltering them high with a 
cotton string. It was one of these hatless 
children of original Guinea that had crept up 
to him as he lay asleep in the summer grass 
60 



Uncle Tom at Home 

and told him where the best hidden of all nests 
was to be found in a far fence corner— that of 
the high-tempered, scolding guinea-hen. To 
them he showed his first Barlow knife ; for 
them he blew his first home-made whistle. 
He is their petty tyrant to - day ; to - morrow 
he will be their repentant friend, dividing with 
them his marbles and proposing a game of hop- 
scotch. Upon his dialect, his disposition, his 
whole character, is laid the ineffaceable impress 
of theirs, so that they pass into the final reck- 
oning-up of his life here and in the world to 

come. 

But Uncle Tom !— the negro overseer of the 
place— the greatest of all the negroes— greater 
even than the cook, when one is not hungry. 
How often has he straddled Uncle Tom's neck, 
or ridden behind him afield on a barebacked 
horse to the jingling music of the trace-chains ! 
It is Uncle Tom who plaits his hempen whip 
and ties the cracker in a knot that will stay. 
It is Uncle Tom who brings him his first young 
squirrel to tame, the teeth of which are soon 
to be planted in his right forefinger. Many a 
time he slips out of the house to take his din- 
ner or supper in the cabin with Uncle Tom ; 
and during long winter evenings he loves to 
sit before those great roaring cabin fireplaces 
that throw their red and yellow lights over the 
61 



Uncle Tom at Home 

half circle of black faces and on the mysteries 
of broom - making, chair - bottoming, and the 
cobbling of shoes. Like the child who listens 
to " Uncle Remus," he, too, hears songs and 
stories, and creeps back to the house with a 
wondering look in his eyes and a vague hush 
of spirit. 

Then come school-days and vacations, during 
which, as Mrs. Stowe says, he may teach Uncle 
Tom to make his letters on a slate or expound 
to him the Scriptures. Then, too, come early 
adventures with the gun, and 'coon hunts and 
'possum hunts with the negroes under the 
round moon, with the long-eared, deep-voiced 
hounds — to him delicious and ever-memorable 
nights ! The crisp air, through which the 
breath rises like white incense, the thick au- 
tumn leaves, begemmed with frost, rustling 
underfoot ; the shadows of the mighty trees ; 
the strained ear ; the heart leaping with excite- 
ment ; the negroes and dogs mingling their 
wild delight in music that wakes the echoes 
of distant hill-sides. Away ! Away ! mile after 
mile, hour after hour, to where the purple and 
golden persimmons hang low from the boughs, 
or where from topmost limbs the wild grape 
drops its countless clusters in a black cascade 
a sheer two hundred feet. 

Now he is a boy no longer, but has his first 
62 



Uncle Tom at Home 

love-affair, which sends a thrill through all 
those susceptible cabins ; has his courtship, 
which gives rise to many a wink and innuendo; 
and brings home his bride, whose coming con- 
verts every youngster into a living rolling ball 
on the ground, and opens the feasts and festiv- 
ities of universal joy. 

Then some day "ole Marster" dies, and the 
negroes, one by one, young and old, file into 
the darkened parlor to take a last look at his 
quiet face. He had his furious temper, "ole 
Marster" had, and his sins — which God for- 
give ! To-day he will be buried, and to-mor- 
row " young Marster " will inherit his saddle- 
horse and ride out into the fields. 

Thus he has come into possession of his ne- 
groes. Among them are a few whose working 
days are over. These are to be kindly cared 
for, decently buried. Next are the active la- 
borers, and, last, the generation of children. 
He knows them all by name, capacity, and dis- 
position ; is bound to them by live-long asso- 
ciations ; hears their communications and com- 
plaints. When he goes to town, he is charged 
with commissions, makes purchases with their 
own money. Continuing the course of his 
father, he sets about making them capable, 
contented workmen. There shall be special 
training for special aptitude. One shall be 
63 



Uncle Tom at Home 

made a blacksmith, a second a carpenter, a 
third a cobbler of shoes. In all the general 
industries of the farm, education shall not be 
lacking. It is claimed that a Kentucky negro 
invented the hemp-brake. As a result of this 
effective management, the Southern planter, 
looking northward, will pay him a handsome 
premium for his blue -grass slave. He will 
have no white overseer. He does not like the 
type of man. Besides, one is not needed. 
Uncle Tom served his father in this capacity ; 
let him be. 

Among his negroes he finds a bad one. What 
shall he do with him ? Keep him ? Keeping 
him makes him worse, and, moreover, he cor- 
rupts the others. Set him free? That is to 
put a reward upon evil. Sell him to his neigh- 
bors ? They do not want him. If they did, he 
would not sell him to them. He sells him into 
the South. This is a statement, not an apol- 
ogy. Here, for a moment, one touches the 
terrible subject of the internal slave-trade. Ne- 
groes were sold from Kentucky into the South- 
ern market because, as has just been said, they 
were bad, or by reason of the law of partible 
inheritance, or, as was the case with Mrs. 
Stowe's Uncle Tom, under constraint of debt. 
Of course, in many cases, they were sold 
wantonly and cruelly ; but these, however 
64 



"i! ,| i l 1llfcsSH»i,,i ' '.■ : ■ ■•! M 




THE COOK 



Uncle Tom at Home 

many, were not enough to make the internal 
slave-trade more than an incidental and sub- 
ordinate feature of the system. The belief that 
negroes in Kentucky were regularly bred and 
reared for the Southern market is a mistaken 
one. Mrs. Stowe herself fell into the error of 
basing an argument for the prevalence of the 
slave-trade in this State upon the notion of ex- 
hausted lands, as the following passage from 
The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabi?i shows : 

" In Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky 
slave-labor long ago impoverished the soil almost be- 
yond recovery and became entirely unprofitable." 

Those words were written some thirty-five 
years ago and refer to a time long prior to that 
date. Now, the fact is that at least one-half 
the soil of Kentucky has never been under 
cultivation, and could not, therefore, have 
been exhausted by slave - labor. At least a 
half of the remainder, though cultivated ever 
since, is still not seriously exhausted ; and of 
the small portion still left a large share was al- 
ways naturally poor, so that for this reason 
slave -labor was but little employed on it. 
The great slave - holding region of the State 
was the fertile region which has never been 
impoverished. To return from this digres- 
sion, it may be well that the typical Kentucky 
e 65 



Uncle Tom at Home 

farmer does not find among his negroes a bad 
one ; for in consequence of the early non-im- 
portation of slaves for barter or sale, and 
through long association with the household, 
they have been greatly elevated and human- 
ized. If he must sell a good one, he will seek 
a buyer among his neighbors. He will even 
ask the negro to name his choice of a master 
and try to consummate his wish. No pur- 
chaser near by, he will mount his saddle-horse 
and look for one in the adjoining county. In 
this way the negroes of different estates and 
neighborhoods were commonly connected by 
kinship and intermarriage. How unjust to 
say that such a master did not feel affection 
for his slaves, anxiety for their happiness, sym- 
pathy with the evils inseparable from their con- 
dition. Let me cite the case of a Kentucky 
master who had failed. He could pay his debts 
by sacrificing his negroes or his farm, one or 
the other. To avoid separating the former, 
probably sending some of them South, he kept 
them in a body and sold his farm. Any one 
who knows the Kentuckian's love of land and 
home will know what this means. A few years, 
and the war left him without anything. An- 
other case is more interesting still. A master 
having failed, actually hurried his negroes off 
to Canada. Tried for defrauding his creditors, 
66 



Uncle Tom at Home 

and that by slave - holding jurors, he was ac- 
quitted. The plea of his counsel, among other 
argumerfts, was the master's unwillingness to 
see his old and faithful servitors scattered and 
suffering. After emancipation old farm hands 
sometimes refused to budge from their cabins. 
Their former masters paid them for their ser- 
vices as long as they could work, and support- 
ed them when helpless. I have in mind an in- 
stance where a man, having left Kentucky, 
sent back hundreds of dollars to an aged, needy 
domestic, though himself far from rich ; and 
another case where a man still contributes an- 
nually to the maintenance of those who ceased 
to work for him the quarter of a century ago. 
The good in human nature is irrepressible. 
Slavery, evil as it was, when looked at from 
the remoteness of human history as it is to be, 
will be adjudged an institution that gave de- 
velopment to certain noble types of character. 
Along with other social forces peculiar to the 
age, it produced in Kentucky a kind of farmer, 
the like of which will never appear again. He 
had the aristocratic virtues: highest notions 
of personal liberty and personal honor, a fine 
especial scorn of anything that was mean, lit- 
tle, cowardly. As an agriculturist he was not 
driving or merciless or grasping ; the rapid 
amassing of wealth was not among his pas- 
6 7 



Uncle Tom at Home 

sions, the contention of splendid living not 
among his thorns. To a certain carelessness 
of riches he added a certain profuseness of ex- 
penditure ; and indulgent towards his own 
pleasures, towards others, his equals or de- 
pendents, he bore himself with a spirit of 
kindness and magnanimity. Intolerant of 
tyranny, he was no tyrant. To say of such a 
man, as Jefferson said of every slave-holder, 
that he lived in perpetual exercise of the most 
boisterous passions and unremitting despotism, 
and in the exaction of the most degrading sub- 
mission, was to pronounce judgment hasty and 
unfair. Rather did Mrs. Stowe, while not blind 
to his faults, discern his virtues when she made 
him, embarrassed by debt, exclaim : " If any- 
body had said to me that I should sell Tom 
down South to one of those rascally traders, I 
should have said, l Is thy servant a dog that he 
should do this thing ?' " 



IV 



BUT there was another person who, more 
than the master, sustained close rela- 
tionship to the negro life of the house- 
hold — the mistress. In the person of Mrs. 
Shelby, Mrs. Stowe described some of the best 
traits of a Kentucky woman of the time ; but 
perhaps only a Southern woman herself could 
do full justice to a character which many du- 
ties and many burdens endued with extraor- 
dinary strength and varied efficiency. 

She was mistress of distinct realms — the 
house and the cabins — and the guardian of the 
bonds between the two, which were always 
troublesome, often delicate, sometimes distress- 
ing. In those cabins were nearly always some 
poor creatures needing sympathy and watch- 
care : the superannuated mothers helpless with 
babes, babes helpless without mothers, the sick, 
perhaps the idiotic. Apparel must be had for 
all. Standing in her doorway and pointing to 
the meadow, she must be able to say in the 
69 



Uncle Tom at Home 

words of a housewife of the period, " There are 
the sheep ; now get your clothes." Some must 
be taught to keep the spindle and the loom go- 
ing ; others trained for dairy, laundry, kitchen, 
dining-room ; others yet taught fine needle- 
work. Upon her fell the labor of private in- 
struction and moral exhortation, for the teach- 
ing of negroes was not forbidden in Kentucky. 
She must remind them that their marriage 
vows are holy and binding ; must interpose be- 
tween mothers and their cruel punishment of 
their own offspring. Hardest of all, she must 
herself punish for lying, theft, immorality. Her 
own children must be guarded against tempta- 
tion and corrupting influences. In her life no 
cessation of this care year in and year out. 
Beneath every other trouble the secret convic- 
tion that she has no right to enslave these creat- 
ures, and that, however improved their con- 
dition, their life is one of great and necessary 
evils. Mrs. Stowe well makes her say : "I have 
tried — tried most faithfully as a Christian wom- 
an should — to do my duty towards these poor, 
simple, dependent creatures. I have cared for 
them, instructed them, watched over them, and 
known all their little cares and joys for years. . . . 
I have taught them the duties of the family, of 
parent and child, and husband and wife. ... I 
thought, by kindness and care and instruction, 
70 



Uncle Tom at Home 

I could make the condition of mine better than 
freedom." Sorely overburdened and heroic 
mould of woman ! Fulfilling each day a round 
of intricate duties, rising at any hour of the 
night to give medicine to the sick, liable at any 
time, in addition to the cares of her great house- 
hold, to see an entire family of acquaintances 
arriving unannounced, with trunks and ser- 
vants of their own, for a visit protracted in ac- 
cordance with the large hospitalities of the time. 
What wonder if, from sheer inability to do all 
things herself, she trains her negroes to differ- 
ent posts of honor, so that the black cook finally 
expels her from her own kitchen and rules over 
that realm as an autocrat of unquestioned pre- 
rogatives ? 

Mistresses of this kind had material reward 
in the trusty adherence of their servants dur- 
ing the war. Their relations throughout this 
period — so well calculated to try the loyalty of 
the African nature — would of themselves make 
up a volume of the most touching incidents. 
Even to-day one will find in many Kentucky 
households survivals of the old order — find 
" Aunt Chloe " ruling as a despot in the kitch- 
en, and making her will the pivotal point of the 
whole domestic system. I have spent nights 
with a young Kentuckian, self-willed and high- 
spirited, whose occasional refusals to rise for a 
7i 



Uncle Tom at Home 

half-past five o'clock breakfast always brought 
the cook from the kitchen up to his bedroom, 
where she delivered her commands in a voice 
worthy of Catherine the Great. " We shall have 
to get up," he would say, " or there'll be a row ! " 
One may yet see old negresses setting out for 
an annual or a semi-annual visit to their former 
mistresses, and bearing some offering — a basket 
of fruits or flowers. I should like to mention 
the case of one who died after the war and left 
her two children to her mistress, to be reared 
and educated. The troublesome, expensive 
charge was faithfully executed. 

Here, in the hard realities of daily life, here 
is where the crushing burden of slavery fell — 
on the women of the South. History has yet 
to do justice to the n®blest type of them, wheth- 
er in Kentucky or elsewhere. In view of what 
they accomplished, despite the difficulties in 
their way, there is nothing they have found 
harder to forgive in the women of the North 
than the failure to sympathize with them in the 
struggles and sorrows of their lot, and to real- 
ize that they were the real practical philanthro- 
pists of the negro race. 



BUT as is the master, so is the slave, and it 
is through the characters of the Shelbys 
that we must approach that of Uncle 
Tom. For of all races, the African — super- 
stitious, indolent, singing, dancing, impression- 
able creature — depends upon others for enlight- 
enment, training, and happiness. If, therefore, 
you find him so intelligent that he may be sent 
on important business, so honest that he may 
be trusted with money, house, and home, so 
loyal that he will not seize opportunity to be- 
come free ; if you find him endowed with the 
manly virtues of dignity and self-respect united 
to the Christian virtues of humility, long-suf- 
fering, and forgiveness, then do not, in marvel- 
ling at him on these accounts, quite forget his 
master and his mistress — they made him what 
he was. And it is something to be said on their 
behalf, that in their household was developed a 
type of slave that could be set upon a sublime 
moral pinnacle to attract the admiration of the 
world. 

73 



Uncle Tom at Home 

Attention is fixed on Uncle Tom first as 
head - servant of the farm. In a small work 
on slavery in Kentucky by George Harris, it 
is stated that masters chose the cruelest of 
their negroes for this office. It is not true, 
exceptions allowed for. The work would not 
be worth mentioning, had not so many people 
at the North believed it. The amusing thing 
is, they believed Mrs. Stowe also. But if Mrs. 
Stowe's account of slavery in Kentucky is true, 
Harris's is not. 

It is true that Uncle Tom inspired the other 
negroes with some degree of fear. He was 
censor of morals, and reported derelictions of 
the lazy, the destructive, and the thievish. 
For instance, an Uncle Tom on one occasion 
told his master of the stealing of a keg of lard, 
naming the thief and the hiding-place. " Say 
not a word about it," replied his master. The 
next day he rode out into the field where the 
culprit was ploughing, and, getting down, 
walked along beside him. "What's the mat- 
ter, William ?" he asked, after a while ; " you 
can't look me in the face as usual." William 
burst into tears, and confessed everything. 
" Come to - night, and I will arrange so that 
you can put the lard back and nobody will 
ever know you took it." The only punish- 
ment was a little moral teaching ; but the 
74 



Uncle Tom at Home 

Uncle Tom in the case, though he kept his 
secret, looked for some days as though the dig- 
nity of his office had not been suitably upheld 
by his master. 

It was Uncle Tom's duty to get the others 
off to work in the morning. In the fields he 
did not drive the work, but led it — being a 
master - workman — led the cradles and the 
reaping - hooks, the hemp - breaking and the 
corn - shucking. The spirit of happy music 
went with the workers. They were not goad- 
ed through their daily tasks by the spur of 
pitiless husbandry. Nothing was more com- 
mon than their voluntary contests of skill and 
power. My recollection reaches only to the 
last two or three years of slavery; but I re- 
member the excitement with which I witnessed 
some of these hard-fought battles of the ne- 
groes. Rival hemp-breakers of the neighbor- 
hood, meeting in the same field, would slip 
out long before breakfast and sometimes nev- 
er stop for dinner. So it was with cradling, 
corn -shucking, or corn -cutting — in all work 
where rivalries were possible. No doubt there 
were other motives. So much work was a 
day's task ; for more there was extra pay. A 
capital hand, by often performing double or 
treble the required amount, would clear a 
neat profit in a season. The days of severest 
75 



Uncle Tom at Home 

labor fell naturally in harvest-time. But then 
intervals of rest in the shade were commonly 
given; and milk, coffee, or, when the prejudice 
of the master did not prevent (which was not 
often), whiskey was distributed between meal- 
times. As a rule, they worked without hurry. 
De Tocqueville gave unintentional testimony 
to characteristic slavery in Kentucky when he 
described the negroes as " loitering " in the 
fields. On one occasion the hands dropped 
work to run after a rabbit the dogs had start- 
ed. A passer-by indignantly reported the fact 
to the master. " Sir," said the old gentle- 
man, with a hot face, " I'd have whipped the 
last d — n rascal of 'em if they Jiadn't run 
'im !" 

The negroes made money off their truck- 
patches, in which they raised melons, broom- 
corn, vegetables. When Charles Sumner was 
in Kentucky, he saw with almost incredulous 
eyes the comfortable cabins with their flowers 
and poultry, the fruitful truck-patches, and a 
genuine Uncle Tom — " a black gentleman with 
his own watch !" Well enough does Mrs. Stowe 
put these words into her hero's mouth, when 
he hears he is to be sold : " I'm feared things 
will be kinder goin' to rack when I'm gone. 
Mas'r can't be 'spected to be a-pryin' round 
everywhere as I've done, a-keepin' up all the 
76 



Uncle Tom at Home 

ends. The boys means well, but they's power- 
ful car'less." 

More interesting is Uncle Tom's character 
as a preacher. Contemporary with him in 
Kentucky was a class of men among his peo- 
ple who exhorted, held prayer-meetings in the 
cabins and baptizings in the woods, performed 
marriage ceremonies, and enjoyed great free- 
dom of movement. There was one in nearly 
every neighborhood, and together they wrought 
effectively in the moral development of their 
race. I have nothing to say here touching the 
vast and sublime conception which Mrs. Stowe 
formed of " Uncle Tom's " spiritual nature. 
But no idealized manifestation of it is better 
than this simple occurrence : One of these ne- 
gro preachers was allowed by his master to fill 
a distant appointment. Belated once, and re- 
turning home after the hour forbidden for 
slaves to be abroad, he was caught by the pa- 
trol and cruelly whipped. As the blows fell, 
his only words were: " Jesus Christ suffered 
for righteousness' sake ; so kin I." Another 
of them was recommended for deacon's orders 
and actually ordained. When liberty came, he 
refused to be free, and continued to work in 
his master's family till his death. With con- 
siderable knowledge of the Bible and a fluent 
tongue, he would nevertheless sometimes grow 
77 



Uncle Tom at Home 

confused while preaching and lose his train of 
thought. At these embarrassing junctures it 
was his wont suddenly to call out at the top of 
his voice, "Saul ! Saul ! why persecutest thou 
me ?" The effect upon his hearers was electri- 
fying ; and as none but a very highly favored 
being could be thought worthy of enjoying 
this persecution, he thus converted his loss of 
mind into spiritual reputation. A third, named 
Peter Cotton, united the vocations of exhorter 
and wood-chopper. He united them literally, 
for one moment Peter might be seen standing 
on his log chopping away, and the next kneel- 
ing down beside it praying. He got his mis- 
tress to make him a long jeans coat and on the 
ample tails of it to embroider, by his direction, 
sundry texts of Scripture, such as : " Come 
unto me, all ye that are heavy laden !" Thus 
literally clothed with righteousness, Peter went 
from cabin to cabin preaching the Word. 
Well for him if that other Peter could have 
seen him. 

These men sometimes made a pathetic ad- 
dition to their marriage ceremonies : " Until 
death or our higher powers do you separate!" 

Another typical contemporary of Uncle 
Tom's was the negro fiddler. It should be re- 
membered that before he hears he is to be sold 
South, Uncle Tom is pictured as a light-heart- 
73 




THE PREACHER 



Uncle Tom at Home 

ed creature, capering and dancing in his cabin. 
There was no lack of music in those cabins. 
The banjo was played, but more commonly the 
fiddle. A home-made variety of the former 
consisted of a crook-necked, hard-shell gourd 
and a piece of sheepskin. There were some- 
times other instruments — the flageolet and the 
triangle. I have heard of a kettle-drum's being- 
made of a copper still. A Kentucky negro car- 
ried through the war as a tambourine the skull 
of a mule, the rattling teeth being secured in 
the jawbones. Of course bones were every- 
where used. Negro music on one or more in- 
struments was in the highest vogue at the house 
of the master. The young Kentuckians often 
used it on serenading bravuras. The old fid- 
dler, most of all, was held in reverent esteem 
and met with the gracious treatment of the 
minstrel in feudal halls. At parties and wed- 
dings, at picnics in the summer woods, he was 
the soul of melody ; and with an eye to the 
high demands upon his art, he widened his 
range of selections and perfected according to 
native standards his inimitable technique. The 
deep, tender, pure feeling in the song "Old 
Kentucky Home " is a true historic interpre- 
tation. 

It is wide of the mark to suppose that on 
such a farm as that of the Shelbys, the negroes 
79 



Uncle Tom at Home 

were in a perpetual frenzy of discontent or felt 
any burning desire for freedom. It is difficult 
to reach a true general conclusion on this deli- 
cate subject. But it must go for something 
that even the Kentucky abolitionists of those 
days will tell you that well -treated negroes 
cared not a snap for liberty. Negroes them- 
selves, and very intelligent ones, will give you 
to-day the same assurance. It is an awkward 
discovery to make, that some of them still cher- 
ish resentment towards agitators who came se- 
cretly among them, fomented discontent, and 
led them away from homes to which they af- 
terwards returned. And I want to state here, 
for no other reason than that of making an his- 
toric contribution to the study of the human 
mind and passions, that a man's views of slavery 
in those days did not determine his treatment 
of his own slaves. The only case of mutiny 
and stampede that I have been able to discover 
in a certain part of Kentucky, took place among 
the negroes of a man who was known as an out- 
spoken emancipationist. He pleaded for the 
freedom of the negro, but in the mean time 
worked him at home with the chain round his 
neck and the ball resting on his plough. 

Christmas was, of course, the time of holiday 
merrymaking, and the " Ketchin' marster an' 
mistiss Christmus gif " was a great feature. 
80 



Uncle Tom at Home 

One morning an aged couple presented them- 
selves. 

"Well, what do you want for your Christmas 
gift?" 

" Freedom, mistiss !" 

" Freedom ! Haven't you been as good as 
free for the last ten years ?" 

" Yaas, mistiss ; but — freedom mighty sweet!" 

"Then take your freedom !" 

The only method of celebrating the boon was 
the moving into a cabin on the neighboring 
farm of their mistress's aunt and being freely 
supported there as they had been freely sup- 
ported at home. 

Mrs. Stowe has said, " There is nothing pict- 
uresque or beautiful in the family attachment 
of old servants, which is not to be found in 
countries where these servants are legally free." 
On the contrary, a volume of incidents might 
readily be gathered, the picturesqueness and 
beauty of which are due wholly to the fact that 
the negroes were not free, but slaves. Indeed, 
many could never have happened at all but in 
this relationship. I cite the case of an old ne- 
gro who was buying his freedom from his mas- 
ter, who continued to make payments during 
the war, and made the final one at the time of 
General Kirby Smith's invasion of Kentucky. 
After he had paid him the uttermost farthing, 
f 81 



Uncle Tom at Home 

he told him that if he should ever be a slave 
again, he wanted him for his master. Take the 
case of an old negress who had been allowed 
to accumulate considerable property. At her 
death she willed it to her young master instead 
of to her sons, as she would have been allowed 
to do. But the war ! what is to be said of the 
part the negro took in that ? Is there in the 
drama of humanity a figure more picturesque 
or more pathetic than the figure of the African 
slave, as he followed his master to the battle- 
field, marched and hungered and thirsted with 
him, served and cheered and nursed him — that 
master who was fighting to keep him in slavery ? 
Instances are too many ; but the one may be 
mentioned of a Kentucky negro who followed 
his young master into the Southern army, 
stayed with him till he fell on the field, lay hid 
out in the bushes a week, and finally, after a 
long time and many hardships, got back to his 
mistress in Kentucky, bringing his dead mas- 
ter's horse and purse and trinkets. This sub- 
ject comprises a whole vast field of its own ; 
and if the history of it is ever written, it will 
be written in the literature of the South, for 
there alone lies the knowledge and the love. 

It is only through a clear view of the peculiar 
features of slavery in Kentucky before the war 
that one can understand the general status of 



Uncle Tom at Home 

the negroes of Kentucky at the present time. 
Perhaps in no other State has the race made 
less endeavor to push itself into equality with 
the white. This fact must be explained as in 
part resulting from the conservative ideals of 
Kentucky life in general. But it is more large- 
ly due to the influences of a system which, 
though no longer in vogue, is still remember- 
ed, still powerful to rule the minds of a natu- 
rally submissive and susceptible people. The 
kind, affectionate relations of the races under 
the old regime have continued with so little in- 
terruption that the blacks remain content with 
their inferiority, and lazily drift through life. 
I venture to make the statement that, wherever 
in the United States they have attempted most 
to enforce their new-born rights, they have 
either, on the one hand, been encouraged to do 
so, or have, on the other, been driven to self- 
assertion by harsh treatment. But treated al- 
ways kindly, always as hopelessly inferior be- 
ings, they will do least for themselves. This, 
it is believed, is the key-note to the situation in 
Kentucky at the present time. 



COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 



I 



THE institutions of the Kentuckian have 
deep root in his rich social nature. He 
loves the swarm. The very motto of 
the State is a declaration of good-fellowship, 
and the seal of the commonwealth the act of 
shaking hands. Divided, he falls. The Ken- 
tuckian must be one of many ; must assert him- 
self, not through the solitary exercise of his 
intellect, but the senses ; must see men about 
him who are fat ; grip his friend, hear cordial, 
hearty conversation, realize the play of his emo- 
tions. Society is the multiple of himself. 

Hence his fondness for large gatherings : 
open-air assemblies of the democratic sort — 
great agricultural fairs, race-courses, political 
meetings, barbecues and burgoos in the woods 
— where no one is pushed to the wall, or re- 
duced to a seat and to silence, where all may 
move about at will, seek and be sought, make 
and receive impressions. Quiet masses of peo- 
ple in-doors absorb him less. He is not fond of 
87 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

lectures, does not build splendid theatres or ex- 
pend lavishly for opera, is almost of Puritan 
excellence in the virtue of church-going, which 
in the country is attended with neighborly re- 
unions. 

This large social disposition underlies the 
history of the most social of all his days — a day 
that has long had its observance embedded in 
the structure of his law, is invested with the 
authority and charm of old-time usage and 
reminiscence, and still enables him to com- 
mingle business and pleasure in a way of his 
own. Hardly more characteristic of the Athe- 
nian was the agora, or the forum of the Roman, 
than is county court day characteristic of the 
Kentuckian. In the open square around the 
court-house of the county-seat he has had the 
centre of his public social life, the arena of his 
passions and amusements, the rallying-point of 
his political discussions, the market-place of his 
business transactions, the civil unit of his in- 
stitutional history. 

It may be that some stranger has sojourned 
long enough in Kentucky to have grown famil- 
iar with the wonted aspects of a county town. 
He has remarked the easy swing of its daily 
life : amicable groups of men sitting around 
the front entrances of the hotels ; the few pur- 
chasers and promenaders on the uneven brick 
88 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

pavements ; the few vehicles of draught and 
carriage scattered along the level white thor- 
oughfares. All day the subdued murmur of 
patient local traffic has scarcely drowned the 
twittering of English sparrows in the maples. 
Then comes a Monday morning when the whole 
scene changes. The world has not been dead, 
but only sleeping. Whence this sudden surg- 
ing crowd of rural folk — these lowing herds in 
the streets ? Is it some animated pastoral come 
to town ? some joyful public anniversary ? some 
survival in altered guise of the English coun- 
try fair of mellower times ? or a vision of what 
the little place will be a century hence, when 
American life shall be packed and agitated and 
tense all over the land? What a world of 
homogeneous, good-looking, substantial, re- 
poseful people with honest front and amiable 
meaning ! What bargaining and buying and 
selling by ever-forming, ever-dissolving groups, 
with quiet laughter and familiar talk and end- 
less interchange of domestic interrogatories ! 
You descend into the street to study the doings 
and spectacles from a nearer approach, and 
stop to ask the meaning of it. Ah! it is county 
court day in Kentucky ; it is the Kentuckians 
in the market-place. 



II 



THEY have been assembling here now for 
nearly a hundred years. One of the first 
demands of the young commonwealth 
in the woods was that its vigorous, passionate 
life should be regulated by the usages of civil 
law. Its monthly county courts, with justices 
of the peace, were derived from the Virginia 
system of jurisprudence, where they formed the 
aristocratic feature of the government. Vir- 
ginia itself owed these models to England; and 
thus the influence of the courts and of the de- 
cent and orderly yeomanry of both lands passed, 
as was singularly fitting, over into the ideals 
of justice erected by the pure-blooded colony. 
As the town-meeting of Boston town perpet- 
uated the folkmote of the Anglo-Saxon free 
state, and the Dutch village communities on 
the shores of the Hudson revived the older 
ones on the banks of the Rhine, so in Ken- 
tucky, through Virginia, there were transplant- 
ed by the people, themselves of clean stock and 
90 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

with strong conservative ancestral traits, the 
influences and elements of English law in rela- 
tion to the county, the court, and the justice 
of the peace. 

Through all the old time of Kentucky State 
life there towers up the figure of the justice of 
the peace. Commissioned by the Governor to 
hold monthly court, he had not always a court- 
house wherein to sit, but must buy land in the 
midst of a settlement or town whereon to build 
one, and build also the contiguous necessity of 
civilization — a jail. In the rude court-room he 
had a long platform erected, usually running 
its whole width ; on this platform he had a 
ruder wooden bench placed, likewise extend- 
ing all the way across ; and on this bench, hav- 
ing ridden into town, it may be, in dun-colored 
leggings, broadcloth pantaloons, a pigeon-tailed 
coat, a shingle - caped overcoat, and a twelve- 
dollar high fur hat, he sat gravely and sturdily 
down amid his peers ; looking out upon the 
bar, ranged along a wooden bench beneath, 
and prepared to consider the legal needs of his 
assembled neighbors. Among them all the 
very best was he ; chosen for age, wisdom, 
means, weight and probity of character ; as a 
rule, not profoundly versed in the law, perhaps 
knowing nothing of it — being a Revolutionary 
soldier, a pioneer, or a farmer — but endowed 
9i 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

with a sure, robust common-sense and recti- 
tude of spirit that enabled him to divine what 
the law was ; shaking himself fiercely loose 
from the grip of mere technicalities, and decid- 
ing by the natural justice of the case ; giving 
decisions of equal authority with the highest 
court, an appeal being rarely taken ; perpet- 
uating his own authority by appointing his 
own associates : with all his shortcomings and 
weaknesses a notable, historic figure, high- 
minded, fearless, and incorruptible, dignified, 
patient, and strong, and making the county 
court days of Kentucky for wellnigh half a 
century memorable to those who have lived 
to see justice less economically and less honor- 
ably administered. 

But besides the legal character and intent of 
the day which was thus its first and dominant 
feature, divers things drew the folk together. 
Even the justice himself may have had quite 
other than magisterial reasons for coming to 
town ; certainly the people had. They must 
interchange opinions about local and national 
politics, observe the workings of their own laws, 
pay and contract debts, acquire and transfer 
property, discuss all questions relative to the 
welfare of the community — holding, in fact, a 
county court day much like one in Virginia 
in the middle of the seventeenth century. 
92 



Ill 



BUT after business was over, time hung 
idly on their hands ; and being vigorous 
men, hardened by work in forest and 
field, trained in foot and limb to fleetness and 
endurance, and fired with admiration of phys- 
ical prowess, like riotous school-boys out on a 
half-holiday, they fell to playing. All through 
the first quarter of the century, and for a lon- 
ger time, county court day in Kentucky was, 
at least in many parts of the State, the occa- 
sion for holding athletic games. The men, 
young or in the sinewy manhood of more than 
middle age, assembled once a month at the 
county-seats to witness and take part in the 
feats of muscle and courage. They wrestled, 
threw the sledge, heaved the bar, divided and 
played at fives, had foot-races for themselves, 
and quarter-races for their horses. By-and-by, 
as these contests became a more prominent 
feature of the day, they would pit against each 
other the champions of different neighbor- 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

hoods. It would become widely known before- 
hand that next county court day " the bully " 
in one end of the county would whip "the 
bully " in the other end ; so when court day 
came, and the justices came, and the bullies 
came, what was the county to do but come 
also ? The crowd repaired to the common, a 
ring was formed, the little men on the outside 
who couldn't see, Zaccheus - like, took to the 
convenient trees, and there was to be seen a 
fair and square set-to, in which the fist was the 
battering-ram and the biceps a catapult. What 
better, more time -honored proof could those 
backwoods Kentuckians have furnished of the 
humors in their English blood and of their 
English pugnacity? But, after all, this was 
only play, and play never is perfectly satisfy- 
ing to a man who would rather fight ; so from 
playing they fell to harder work, and through- 
out this period county court day was the 
monthly Monday on which the Kentuckian 
regularly did his fighting. He availed himself 
liberally of election day, it is true, and of regi- 
mental muster in the spring and battalion mus- 
ter in the fall — great gala occasions ; but county 
court day was by all odds the preferred and high- 
ly prized season. It was periodical, and could 
be relied upon, being written in the law, noted 
in the almanac, and registered in the heavens. 
94 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

A capital day, a most admirable and serene 
day for fighting. Fights grew like a fresh- 
water polype — by being broken in two : each 
part produced a progeny. So conventional 
did the recreation become that difficulties oc- 
curring out in the country between times regu- 
larly had their settlements postponed until the 
belligerents could convene with the justices. 
The men met and fought openly in the streets, 
the friends of each standing by to see fair play 
and whet their appetites. 

Thus the justices sat quietly on the bench 
inside, and the people fought quietly in the 
streets outside, and the day of the month set 
apart for the conservation of the peace became 
the approved day for individual war. There 
is no evidence to be had that either the jus- 
tices or the constables ever interfered. 

These pugilistic encounters had a certain 
law of beauty : they were affairs of equal com- 
bat and of courage. The fight over, animosity 
was gone, the feud ended. The men must 
shake hands, go and drink together, become 
friends. We are touching here upon a grave 
and curious fact of local history. The fighting 
habit must be judged by a wholly unique stand- 
ard. It was the direct outcome of racial traits 
powerfully developed by social conditions. 
95 



IV 



ANOTHER noticeable recreation of the day 
was the drinking. Indeed, the two pleas- 
*• ures went marvellously well together. 
The drinking led up to the fighting, and the 
fighting led up to the drinking ; and this amia- 
ble co-operation might be prolonged at will. The 
merchants kept barrels of whiskey in their cel- 
lars for their customers. Bottles of it sat open- 
ly on the counter, half-way between the pocket 
of the buyer and the shelf of merchandise. 
There were no saloons separate from the tav- 
erns. At these whiskey was sold and drunk 
without screens or scruples. It was not usu- 
ally bought by the drink, but by the tickler. 
The tickler was a bottle of narrow shape, hold- 
ing a half-pint — just enough to tickle. On a 
county court day wellnigh a whole town would 
be tickled. In some parts of the State tables 
were placed out on the sidewalks, and around 
these the men sat drinking mint -juleps and 
playing draw-poker and " old sledge." 
96 



MM '•,. 










County Court Day in Kentucky 

Meantime the day was not wholly given over 
to playing and fighting and drinking. More 
and more it was becoming the great public day 
of the month, and mirroring the life and spirit 
of the times — on occasion a day of fearful, mo- 
mentous gravity, as in the midst of war, finan- 
cial distress, high party feeling ; more and 
more the people gathered together for discus- 
sion and the origination of measures determin- 
ing the events of their history. Gradually new 
features incrusted it. The politician, observ- 
ing the crowd, availed himself of it to announce 
his own candidacy or to wage a friendly cam- 
paign, sure, whether popular or unpopular, of 
a courteous hearing ; for this is a virtue of the 
Kentuckian, to be polite to a public speaker, 
however little liked his cause. In the spring, 
there being no fairs, it was the occasion for ex- 
hibiting the fine stock of the country, which 
was led out to some suburban pasture, where 
the owners made speeches over it. In the win- 
ter, at the close of the old or the beginning of 
the new year, negro slaves were regularly hired 
out on this day for the ensuing twelvemonth, 
and sometimes put upon the block before the 
court-house door and sold for life. 

But it was not until near the half of the sec- 
ond quarter of the century that an auctioneer 
originated stock sales on the open square, and 
g 97 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

thus gave to the day the characteristic it has 
since retained of being the great market-day of 
the month. Thenceforth its influence was to 
be more widely felt, to be extended into other 
counties and even States ; thenceforth it was 
to become more distinctively a local institution 
without counterpart. 

To describe minutely the scenes of a county 
court day in Kentucky, say at the end of the 
half-century, would be to write a curious page 
in the history of the times ; for they were pos- 
sible only through the unique social conditions 
they portrayed. It was near the most prosper- 
ous period of State life under the old regime. 
The institution of slavery was about to cul- 
minate and decline. Agriculture had about as 
nearly perfected itself as it was ever destined 
to do under the system of bondage. The war 
cloud in the sky of the future could be covered 
with the hand, or at most with the country gen- 
tleman's broad-brimmed straw-hat. The whole 
atmosphere of the times was heavy with ease, 
and the people, living in perpetual contempla- 
tion of their superabundant natural wealth, bore 
the quality of the land in their manners and 
dispositions. 

When the well-to-do Kentucky farmer got 
up in the morning, walked out into the porch, 
stretched himself, and looked at the sun, he 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

knew that he could summon a sleek, kindly ne- 
gro to execute every wish and whim — one to 
search for his misplaced hat, a second to bring 
him a dipper of ice-water, a third to black his 
shoes, a fourth to saddle his horse and hitch it 
at the stiles, a fifth to cook his breakfast, a sixth 
to wait on him at the table, a seventh to stand 
on one side and keep off the flies. Breakfast 
over, he mounted his horse and rode out where 
"the hands" were at work. The chance was 
his overseer or negro foreman was there before 
him : his presence was unnecessary. What a 
gentleman he was ! This was called earning 
one's bread by the sweat of his brow. Whose 
brow? He yawned. What should he do ? One 
thing he knew he would do — take a good nap 
before dinner. Perhaps he had better ride over 
to the blacksmith-shop. However, there was 
nobody there. It was county court day. The 
sky was blue, the sun golden, the air delightful, 
the road broad and smooth, the gait of his horse 
the very poetry of motion. He would go to 
county court himself. There was really noth- 
ing else before him. His wife would want to 
go, too, and the children. 

So away they go, he on horseback or in the 

family carriage, with black Pompey driving in 

front and yellow Caesar riding behind. The 

turnpike reached, the progress of the family 

99 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

carriage is interrupted or quite stopped, for 
there are many other carriages on the road, 
all going in the same direction. Then pa, 
growing impatient, orders black Pompey to 
drive out on one side, whip up the horses, pass 
the others, and get ahead, so as to escape from 
the clouds of white limestone dust, which set- 
tles thick on the velvet collar of pa's blue 
cloth coat and in the delicate pink marabou 
feathers of ma's bonnet : which Pompey can't 
do, for the faster he goes, the faster the oth- 
ers go, making all the more dust ; so that pa 
gets red in the face, and jumps up in the seat, 
and looks ready to fight, and thrusts his head 
out of the window and knocks off his hat ; 
and ma looks nervous, and black Pompey and 
yellow Cassar both look white with dust and 
fear. 

A rural cavalcade indeed ! Besides the car- 
riages, buggies, horsemen, and pedestrians, 
there are long droves of stock being hurried on 
towards the town — hundreds of them. By the 
time they come together in the town they will 
be many thousands. For is not this the great 
stock-market of the West, and does not the 
whole South look from its rich plantations and 
cities up to Kentucky for bacon and mules ? 
By-and-by our family carriage does at last get 
to town, and is left out in the streets along with 
ioo 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

many others to block up the passway according 
to the custom. 

The town is packed. It looks as though by 
some vast suction system it had with one exer- 
cise of force drawn all the country life into it- 
self. The poor dumb creatures gathered in 
from the peaceful fields, and crowded around 
the court-house, send forth, each after its kind, 
a general outcry of horror and despair at the 
tumult of the scene and the unimaginable mys- 
tery of their own fate. They overflow into the 
by-streets, where they take possession of the 
sidewalks, and debar entrance at private resi- 
dences. No stock-pens wanted then ; none want- 
ed now. If a town legislates against these stock 
sales on the streets and puts up pens on its out- 
skirts, straightway the stock is taken to some 
other market, and the town is punished for its 
airs by a decline in its trade. 

As the day draws near noon, the tide of life 
is at the flood. Mixed in with the tossing horns 
and nimble heels of the terrified, distressed, 
half-maddened beasts, are the people. Above 
the level of these is the discordant choir of 
shrill-voiced auctioneers on horseback. At the 
corners of the streets long-haired — and long- 
eared — doctors in curious hats lecture to eager 
groups on maladies and philanthropic cures. 
Every itinerant vender of notion and nostrum 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

in the country-side is there ; every wandering 
Italian harper or musician of any kind, be he 
but a sightless fiddler, who brings forth with 
poor unison of voice and string the brief and 
too fickle ballads of the time, '* Gentle Annie," 
and " Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt." Strangely con- 
trasted with everything else in physical type 
and marks of civilization are the mountaineers, 
who have come down to " the settlemints " 
driving herds of their lean, stunted cattle, or 
bringing, in slow-moving, ox-drawn " steam- 
boat " wagons, maple-sugar, and baskets, and 
poles, and wild mountain fruit — faded wagons, 
faded beasts, faded clothes, faded faces, faded 
everything. A general day for buying and 
selling all over the State. What purchases at 
the dry-goods stores and groceries to keep all 
those negroes at home fat and comfortable and 
comely — cottons, and gay cottonades, and gor- 
geous turbans, and linseys of prismatic dyes, 
bags of Rio coffee and barrels of sugar, with 
many another pleasant thing ! All which will 
not be taken home in the family carriage, but 
in the wagon which Scipio Africanus is driving 
in ; vScipio, remember ; for while the New-Eng- 
lander has been naming his own flesh and blood 
Peleg and Hezekiah and Abednego, the Ken- 
tuckian has been giving even his negro slaves 
mighty and classic names, after his taste and 
1 02 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

fashion. But very mockingly and satirically 
do those victorious titles contrast with the con- 
dition of those that wear them. A surging pop- 
ulace, an in -town holiday for all rural folk, 
wholly unlike what may be seen elsewhere in 
this country. The politician will be sure of his 
audience to-day in the court-house yard ; the 
seller will be sure of the purchaser ; the idle 
man of meeting one still idler ; friend of seeing 
distant friend ; blushing Phyllis, come in to buy 
fresh ribbons, of being followed through the 
throng by anxious Corydon. 

And what, amid this tumult of life and affairs 
— what of the justice of the peace, whose figure 
once towered up so finely ? Alas ! quite out- 
grown, pushed aside, and wellnigh forgotten. 
The very name of the day which once so sternly 
commemorated the exercise of his authority 
has wandered into another meaning. "County 
court day " no longer brings up in the mind the 
image of the central court-house and the judge 
on the bench. It is to be greatly feared his 
noble type is dying. The stain of venality has 
soiled his homespun ermine, and the trail of the 
office-seeker passed over his rough-hewn bench. 
So about this time the new constitution of the 
commonwealth comes in, to make the auto- 
cratic ancient justice over into the modern 
elective magistrate, and with the end of the 
103 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

half-century to close a great chapter of wonder- 
ful county court days. 

But what changes in Kentucky since 1850 ! 
How has it fared with the day meantime ? What 
development has it undergone ? What con- 
trasts will it show? 

Undoubtedly, as seen now, the day is not 
more interesting by reason of the features it 
wears than for the sake of comparison with the 
others it has lost. A singular testimony to the 
conservative habits of the Kentuckian, and to 
the stability of his local institutions, is to be 
found in the fact that it should have come 
through all this period of upheaval and down- 
fall, of shifting and drifting, and yet remained 
so much the same. Indeed, it seems in nowise 
liable to lose its meaning of being the great 
market and general business day as well as the 
great social and general laziness day of the 
month and the State. Perhaps one feature has 
taken larger prominence — the eager canvassing 
of voters by local politicians and office-seek- 
ers for weeks, sometimes for months, before- 
hand. Is it not known that even circuit court 
will adjourn on this day so as to give the clerk 
and the judge, the bar, the witnesses, an oppor- 
tunity to hear rival candidates address the as- 
sembled crowd? And yet we shall discover 
differences. These people — these groups of 
104 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

twos and threes and hundreds, lounging, sit- 
ting, squatting, taking every imaginable post- 
ure that can secure bodily comfort — are they 
in any vital sense new Kentucldans in the new 
South ? If you care to understand whether this 
be true, and what it may mean if it is true, you 
shall not find abetter occasion for doing so than 
a contemporary county court day. 

The Kentuckian nowadays does not come to 
county court to pick a quarrel or to settle one. 
He has no quarrel. His fist has reverted to 
its natural use and become a hand. Nor does 
he go armed. Positively it is true that gentle- 
men in this State do not now get satisfaction 
out of each other in the market-place, and that 
on a modern county court day a three-cornered 
hat is hardly to be seen. And yet you will go 
on defining a Kentuckian in terms of his grand- 
father, unaware that he has changed faster than 
the family reputation. The fighting habit and 
the shooting habit were both more than satis- 
fied during the Civil War. 

Another old-time feature of the day has dis- 
appeared — the open use of the pioneer bever- 
age. Merchants do not now set it out for their 
customers ; in the country no longer is it the 
law of hospitality to offer it to a guest. To do 
so would commonly be regarded in the light of 
as great a liberty as to have omitted it once 
105 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

would have been considered an offence. The 
decanter is no longer found on the sideboard 
in the home ; the barrel is not stored in the 
cellar. 

Some features of the old Kentucky market- 
place have disappeared. The war and the 
prostration of the South destroyed that as a 
market for certain kinds of stock, the raising 
and sales of which have in consequence de- 
clined. Railways have touched the eastern 
parts of the State, and broken up the distant, 
toilsome traffic with the steamboat wagons of 
the mountaineers. No longer is the day the 
general buying day for the circumjacent coun- 
try as formerly, when the farmers, having great 
households of slaves, sent in their wagons and 
bought on twelve-months' credit, knowing it 
would be twenty-four months' if they desired. 
The doctors, too, have nearly vanished from 
the street corners, though on the highway one 
may still happen upon the peddler with his 
pack, and in the midst of an eager throng still 
may meet the swaying, sightless old fiddler, 
singing to ears that never tire gay ditties in a 
cracked and melancholy tone. 

Through all changes one feature has re- 
mained. It goes back to the most ancient 
days of local history. The Kentuckian will 
come to county court "to swap horses"; it is 
106 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

in the blood. In one small town may be seen 
fifty or a hundred countrymen assembled dur- 
ing the afternoon in a back street to engage in 
this delightful recreation. Each rides or leads 
his worst, most objectionable beast ; of these, 
however fair-seeming, none is above suspicion. 
It is the potter's field, the lazar-house, the beg- 
gardom of horse - flesh. The stiff and aged 
bondsman of the glebe and plough looks out 
of one filmy eye upon the hopeless wreck of 
the fleet roadster, and the poor macerated car- 
cass that in days gone by bore its thankless 
burden over the glistening turnpikes with the 
speed and softness of the wind has not the 
strength to return the contemptuous kick 
which is given him by a lungless, tailless 
rival. Prices range from nothing upward. 
Exchanges are made for a piece of tobacco or 
a watermelon to boot. 

But always let us return from back streets 
and side thoughts to the central court-house 
square and the general assembly of the peo- 
ple. Go among them ; they are not danger- 
ous. Do not use fine words, at which they will 
prick up their ears uneasily ; or delicate senti- 
ments, which will make you less liked ; or in- 
dulge in flights of thought, which they despise. 
Remember, here is the dress and the talk and 
the manners of the street, and fashion yourself 
107 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

accordingly. Be careful of your speech ; men 
in Kentucky are human. If you can honestly 
praise them, do so. How they will glow and 
expand ! Censure, and you will get the cold 
shoulder. For to them praise is friendship and 
censure enmity. They have wonderful solidar- 
ity. Sympathy will on occasion flow through 
them like an electric current, so that they will 
soften and melt, or be set on fire. There is a 
Kentucky sentiment, expending itself in com- 
placent, mellow love of the land, the people, 
the institutions. You speak to them of the 
happiness of living in parts of the world where 
life has infinite variety, nobler general possi- 
bilities, greater gains, harder struggles ; they 
say, " We are just as happy here." " It is ea- 
sier to make a living in Kentucky than to keep 
from being run over in New York," said a 
young Kentuckian ; and home he went. 

If you attempt to deal with them in the busi- 
ness of the market-place, do not trick or cheat 
them. Above all things they hate and despise 
intrigue and deception. For one single act of 
dishonor a man will pay with life-long aversion 
and contempt. The rage it puts them in to 
be charged with lying themselves is the exact 
measure of the excitement with which they re- 
gard the lie in others. This is one of their 
idols — an idol of the market-place in the true 
1 08 




GENTLEMEN OK LEISURE 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

meaning of the Baconian philosophy. The new 
Kentuckian lias not lost an old-time trait of 
character : so high and delicate a sense of per- 
sonal lienor that to be told he lies is the same 
as saying he has ceased to be a gentleman. 
Along with good faith and fair dealing goes 
liberality. Not prodigality ; they have changed 
all that. The fresh system of things has pro- 
duced no more decided result than a different 
regard for material interests. You shall not 
again charge the Kentuckians with lacking 
either "the telescopic appreciation of distant 
gain," or tin; microscopic appreciation of pres- 
ent ^ain. The influence of money is active, 
and the illusion of wealth become a reality. 
Profits are now more likely to pass into accu- 
mulation and structure. There is moredisons- 
sion of costs and value:;. Small economies are 
more dwelt upon in thought and conversation. 
Actually you shall find the people higgling with 
the dealer over prices. And yet how signifi- 
cant a fact is it in their life that the merchant 
does not, as a rule, ^ive exact change over the 
counter ! At least the cent has not yet been 
put under the microscope. 

Perhaps you will not accept it as an evidence 

of progress that so many men will leave their 

business all over the country for an idle day 

once a month in town — nay, oftener than once 

[09 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

a month ; for many who are at county court in 
this place to-day will attend it in another coun- 
ty next Monday. But do not be deceived by 
the lazy appearance of the streets. There arc 
fewer idlers than of old. You may think this 
quiet group of men who have taken possession 
of a buggy or a curb-stone are out upon a cost- 
ly holiday. Draw near, and it is discovered that 
there is fresh, eager, intelligent talk of the new- 
est agricultural implements and of scientific 
farming. In fact, the clay is to the assembled 
farmers the seed-time of ideas, to be scattered 
in ready soil — an informal, unconscious meet- 
ing of grangers. 

There seems to be a striking equality of sta- 
tions and conditions. Having travelled through 
many towns, and seen these gatherings togeth- 
er of all classes, you will be pleased with the 
fair, attractive, average prosperity, and note 
the almost entire absence of paupers and beg- 
gars. Somehow misfortune and ill-fortune and 
old age save themselves here from the last hard 
necessity of asking alms on the highway. But 
the appearance of the people will easily lead you 
to a wrong inference as to social equality. They 
are much less democratic than they seem, and 
their dress and speech and manners in the 
market-place are not their best equipment. 
Yon shall meet with these in their homes. In 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

their homes, too, social distinctions begin and 
are enforced, and men Avho find in the open 
square a common footing never associate else- 
where. But even among the best of the new 
Kentuckians will you hardly observe fidelity to 
the old social ideals, which adjudged that the 
very flower of birth and training must bloom 
in the bearing and deportment. With the 
crumbling and downfall of the old system fell 
also the structure of fine manners, which were 
at once its product and adornment. 



VI 



ANEW figure has made its appearance in 
the Kentucky market-place, having set 
its face resolutely towards the immemo- 
rial court-house and this periodic gathering to- 
gether of freemen. Beyond comparison the 
most significant new figure that has made its 
way thither and cast its shadow on the people 
and the ground. Writ all over with problems 
that not the wisest can read. Stalking out of 
an awful past into what uncertain future ! 
Clothed in hanging rags, it may be, or a garb 
that is a mosaic of strenuous patches. Ah ! 
Pompey, or Caesar, or Cicero, of the days of 
slavery, where be thy family carriage, thy mas- 
ter and mistress, now ? 

He comes into the county court, this old Af- 
rican, because he is a colored Kentuckian and 
must honor the stable customs of the country. 
He does little buying or selling ; he is not a 
politician ; he has no debt to collect, and no 
legal business. Still, example is powerful and 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

the negro imitative, so here he is at county 
court. It is one instance of the influence ex- 
erted over him by the institutions of the Ken- 
tuckian, so that he has a passion for fine stock, 
must build amphitheatres and hold fairs and 
attend races. Naturally, therefore, county court 
has become a great social day with his race. 
They stop work and come in from the country, 
or from the outskirts of the town, where they 
have congregated in little frame houses, and 
exhibit a quasi-activity in whatever of business 
and pleasure is going forward. In no other 
position of life does he exhibit his character 
and his condition more strikingly than here. 
Always comical, always tragical, light-hearted, 
sociable ; his shackles stricken off, but wearing 
those of his own indolence, ignorance, and help- 
lessness ; the wandering Socrates of the streets, 
always dropping little shreds of observation on 
human affairs and bits of philosophy on human 
life; his memory working with last Sunday's 
sermon, and his hope with to-morrow's bread ; 
citizen, with so much freedom and so little lib- 
erty — the negro forms one of the conspicuous 
features of a county court day at the present 
time. 

A wonderful, wonderful day this is that does 
thus always keep pace with civilization in the 
State, drawing all elements to itself, and por- 
h 113 



County Court Day in Kentucky 

traying them to the interpreting eye. So that 
to paint the scenes of the county court days in 
the past is almost to write the history of the 
contemporary periods ; and to do as much with 
one of the present hour is to depict the oldest 
influences that has survived and the newest 
that has been born in this local environment. 
To the future student of governmental and 
institutional history in this country, a study 
always interesting, always important, and al- 
ways unique, will be county court day in Ken- 
tucky. 



KENTUCKY FAIRS 



I 



THE nineteenth century opened gravely 
for the Kentuckians. Little akin as was 
the spirit of the people to that of the 
Puritans, life among them had been almost as 
granitic in its hardness and ruggedness and 
desolate unrelief. The only thing in the log- 
cabin that had sung from morning till night 
was the spinning-wheel. Not much behind 
those women but danger, anxiety, vigils, devas- 
tation, mournful tragedies ; scarce one of them 
but might fitly have gone to her loom and 
woven herself a garment of sorrow. Not much 
behind those men but felling of trees, clearing 
of land, raising of houses, opening of roads, dis- 
tressing problems of State, desolating wars of 
the republic. Most could remember the time 
when it was so common for a man to be killed, 
that to lie down and die a natural death seem- 
ed unnatural. Many must have had in their 
faces the sadness that was in the face of Lin- 
coln. 

117 



Kentucky Fairs 

Nevertheless, from the first, there had stood 
out among the Kentuckians broad exhibitions 
of exuberant animal vigor, of unbridled animal 
spirits. Some singularly and faithfully enough 
in the ancestral vein of English sports and re- 
laxations — dog-fighting and cock-fighting, rifle 
target-shooting, wrestling matches, foot-racing 
for the men, and quarter-racing for the horses. 
Without any thought of making spectacles or 
of becoming themselves a spectacle in history, 
they were always ready to form an impromptu 
arena and institute athletic games. They had 
even their gladiators. Other rude pleasures 
were more characteristic of their environment 
— the log-rolling and the quilting, the social 
frolic of the harvesting, the merry parties of 
flax-pullers, and the corn-husking at nightfall, 
when the men divided into sides, and the green 
glass whiskey-bottle, stopped with a corn-cob, 
was filled and refilled and passed from mouth 
to mouth, until out of those lusty throats rose 
and swelled a rhythmic choral song that could 
be heard in the deep woods a mile or more away : 
at midnight those who were sober took home 
those who were drunk. But of course none of 
these were organized amusements. They are 
not instances of taking pleasures sadly, but of 
attempts to do much hard, rough work with 
gladness. Other occasions, also, which have 
118 



Kentucky Fairs 

the semblance of popular joys, and which cer- 
tainly were not passed over without merriment 
and turbulent, disorderly fun, were really set 
apart for the gravest of civic and political rea- 
sons : militia musters, stump-speakings, county 
court day assemblages, and the yearly July cele- 
brations. Still other pleasures were of an eco- 
nomic or utilitarian nature. Thus the novel 
and exciting contests by parties of men at squir- 
rel-shooting looked to the taking of that de- 
structive animal's scalp, to say nothing of the 
skin ; the hunting of beehives in the woods had 
some regard to the scarcity of sugar ; and the 
nut gatherings and wild-grape gatherings by 
younger folks in the gorgeous autumnal days 
were partly in memory of a scant, unvaried 
larder, which might profitably draw upon nat- 
ure's rich and salutary hoard. Perhaps the 
dearest pleasures among them were those that 
lay closest to their dangers. They loved the 
pursuit of marauding parties, the solitary chase ; 
were always ready to throw away axe and mat- 
tock for rifle and knife. Among pleasures, cer- 
tainly, should be mentioned the weddings. For 
plain reasons these were commonly held in the 
daytime. Men often rode to them armed, and 
before leaving too often made them scenes of 
carousal and unchastened jocularities. After 
the wedding came the " infare," with the going 
119 



Kentucky Fairs 

from the home of the bride to the home of the 
groom. Above everything else that seems to 
strike the chord of common happiness in the 
society of the time, stands out to the imagi- 
nation the picture of one of these processions — 
a long bridal cavalcade winding slowly along a 
narrow road through the silent, primeval forest, 
now in sunlight, now in the shadow of mighty 
trees meeting over the way ; at the head the 
young lovers, so rudely mounted, so simply 
dressed, and, following in their happy wake, as 
though they were the augury of a peaceful era 
soon to come, a straggling, broken line of the 
men and women who had prepared for that 
era, but should never live to see its appear- 
ing. 

Such scenes as these give a touch of bright, 
gay color to the dull homespun texture of the 
social fabric of the times. Indeed, when all 
the pleasures have been enumerated, they 
seem a good many. But the effect of such 
an enumeration is misleading. Life remained 
tense, sad, barren ; character moulded itself 
on a model of Spartan simplicity and hardi- 
hood, without the Spartan treachery and cun- 
ning. 

But from the opening of the nineteenth cen- 
tury things grew easier. The people, rescued 
from the necessity of trying to be safe, began to 



Kentucky Fairs 

indulge the luxury of wishing to be happy. 
Life ceased to be a warfare, and became 
an industry ; the hand left off defending, 
and commenced acquiring ; the moulding 
of bullets was succeeded by the coining of 
dollars. 



II 



IT is against the background of such a strenu- 
ous past that we find the Kentucky fair 
first projected by the practical and pro- 
gressive spirit that ruled among the Kentuck- 
ians in the year 1816. Nothing could have 
been conceived with soberer purpose, or worn 
less the aspect of a great popular pleasure. 
Picture the scene ! A distinguished soldier 
and honored gentleman, with a taste for agri- 
culture and fine cattle, has announced that on 
a certain day in July he will hold on his farm a 
" Grand Cattle Show and Fair, free for every- 
body." The place is near Lexington, which 
was then the centre of commerce and seat of 
learning in the West. The meagre newspapers 
of the time have carried the tidings to every 
tavern and country cross-roads. It is a novel 
undertaking ; the like has never been known 
this side of the Alleghanies. The summer 
morning come, you may see a very remarkable 
company of gentlemen : old pioneers, Revolu- 



Kentucky Fairs 

tionary soldiers, volunteers of the War of 1812, 
walking in picturesque twos and threes out of 
the little town to the green woods where the 
fair is to be held ; others jogging thitherward 
along the by-paths and newly opened roads 
through the forest, clad in homespun from heel 
to head, and mindful of the cold lunches and 
whiskey-bottles in their coat-pockets or saddle- 
bags ; some, perhaps, drawn thither in wagons 
and aristocratic gigs. Once arrived, all step- 
ping around loftily on the velvet grass, peering 
curiously into each other's eyes, and offering 
their snuffboxes for a sneeze of convivial aston- 
ishment that they could venture to meet under 
the clear sky for such an undertaking. The 
five judges of the fair, coming from as many 
different counties, the greatest personages of 
their day — one, a brilliant judge of the Federal 
Court ; the second, one of the earliest settlers, 
with a sword hanging up at home to show how 
Virginia appreciated his services in the Revo- 
lution : the third, a soldier and blameless gen- 
tleman of the old school ; the fourth, one of the 
few early Kentuckians who brought into the 
new society the noble style of country-place, 
with park and deer, that would have done credit 
to an English lord ; and the fifth, in no respect 
inferior to the others. These "perform the 
duties assigned them with assiduity," and hand 
123 



Kentucky Fairs 

over to their neighbors as many as fifteen or 
twenty premium silver cups, costing twelve 
dollars apiece. After which the assemblage 
variously disperses — part through the woods 
again, while part return to town. 

Such, then, was the first Kentucky fair. It 
was a transplantation to Kentucky, not of the 
English or European fair, but of the English 
cattle - show. It resembled the fair only in 
being a place for buying and selling. And it 
was not thought of in the light of a merry- 
making or great popular amusement. It seems 
not even to have taken account of manufact- 
ures — then so important an industry — or of 
agriculture. 

Like the first was the second fair held in the 
same place the year following. Of this, little 
is and little need be known, save that then was 
formed the first State Agricultural Society of 
Kentucky, which also was the first in the West, 
and the second in the United States. This so- 
ciety held two or three annual meetings, and 
then went to pieces, but not before laying 
down the broad lines on which the fair con- 
tinued to be held for the next quarter of a 
century. That is, the fair began as a cattle- 
show, though stock of other kinds was ex- 
hibited. Then it was extended to embrace 
agriculture ; and with branches of good hus- 
124 



Kentucky Fairs 

bandry it embraced as well those of good 
housewifery. Thus at the early fairs one finds 
the farmers contesting for premiums with 
their wheats and their whiskeys, while their 
skilful helpmates displayed the products — the 
never -surpassed products — of their looms : 
linens, cassinettes, jeans, and carpetings. 

With this brief outline we may pass over the 
next twenty years. The current of State life 
during this interval ran turbulent and stormy. 
Now politics, now finance, imbittered and dis- 
tressed the people. Time and again, here and 
there, small societies revived the fair, but all 
efforts to expand it were unavailing. And yet 
this period must be distinguished as the one 
during which the necessity of the fair became 
widely recognized ; for it taught the Kentuck- 
ians that their chief interest lay in the soil, 
and that physical nature imposed upon them 
the agricultural type of life. Grass was to be 
their portion and their destiny. It taught 
them the insulation of their habitat, and the 
need of looking within their own society for 
the germs and laws of their development. As 
soon as the people came to sec that they were 
to be a race of farmers, it is important to note 
their concern that, as such, they should be 
hedged with respectability. They took high 
ground about it ; they would not cease to be 
125 



Kentucky Fairs 

gentlemen ; they would have their class well re- 
puted for fat pastures and comfortable homes, 
but honored as well for manners and liberal in- 
telligence. And to this end they had recourse 
to an agricultural literature. Thus, when the 
fair began to revive, with happier auspices, 
near the close of the period under consider- 
ation, they signalized it for nearly the quarter 
of a century afterwards by instituting literary 
contests. Prizes and medals were offered for 
discoveries and inventions which should be of 
interest to the Kentucky agriculturist ; and 
hundreds of dollars were appropriated for the 
victors and the second victors in the writing 
of essays which should help the farmer to be- 
come a scientist and not to forget to remain a 
gentleman. In addition, they sometimes sat 
for hours in the open air while some eminent 
citizen — the Governor, if possible — delivered 
an address to commemorate the opening of 
the fair, and to review the progress of agri- 
cultural life in the commonwealth. But there 
were many anti-literarians among them, who 
conceived a sort of organized hostility to what 
they aspersed as book - farming, and on that 
account withheld their cordial support. 



Ill 



IT was not until about the year 1840 that the 
fair began to touch the heart of the whole 
people. Before this time there had been 
no amphitheatre, no music, no booths, no side- 
shows, no ladies. A fair without ladies ! How 
could the people love it, or ever come to look 
upon it as their greatest annual occasion for 
love-making ? 

An interesting commentary on the social 
decorum of this period is furnished in the fact 
that for some twenty years after the institu- 
tion of the fair no woman put her foot upon 
the ground. She was thought a bold woman, 
doing a bold deed, who one day took a friend 
and, under the escort of gentlemen, drove in 
her own carriage to witness the showing of her 
own fat cattle ; for she was herself one of the 
most practical and successful of Kentucky 
farmers. But where one of the sex has been, 
may not all the sex — may not all the world 
— safely follow ? From the date of this event, 
127 



Kentucky Fairs 

and the appearance of women on the grounds, 
the tide of popular favor set in steadily tow- 
ards the fair. 

For, as an immediate consequence, seats 
must be provided. Here one happens upon a 
curious bit of local history — the evolution of 
the amphitheatre among the Kentuckians. At 
the earliest fairs the first form of the amphi- 
theatre had been a rope stretched from tree to 
tree, while the spectators stood around on the 
outside, or sat on the grass or in their vehicles. 
The immediate result of the necessity for pro- 
viding comfortable seats for the now increasing 
crowd, was to select as a place for holding the 
fair such a site as the ancient Greeks might 
have chosen for building a theatre. Sometimes 
this was the head of a deep ravine, around the 
sides of which seats were constructed, while the 
bottom below served as the arena for the ex- 
hibition of the stock, which was led in and out 
through the mouth of the hollow. At other 
times advantage was taken of a natural sink 
and semicircular hill - side. The slope was 
sodded and terraced with rows of seats, and 
the spectators looked down upon the circular 
basin at the bottom. But clearly enough the 
sun played havoc with the complexions of the 
ladies, and a sudden drenching shower was still 
one of the uncomfortable dispensations of Prov- 
128 



Kentucky Fairs 

idence. Therefore a roofed wooden structure 
of temporary seats made its appearance, de- 
signed after the fashion of those used by the 
travelling show, and finally out of this form 
came the closed circular amphitheatre, mod- 
elled on the plan of the Colosseum. Thus first 
among the Kentuckians, if I mistake not, one 
saw the English cattle-show, which meantime 
was gathering about itself many characteristics 
of the English fair, wedded strangely enough 
to the temple of a Roman holiday. By-and-by 
we shall see this form of amphitheatre torn 
down and supplanted by another, which recalls 
the ancient circle or race-course — a modifica- 
tion corresponding with a change in the char- 
acter of the later fair. 

The most desirable spot for building the old 
circular amphitheatre was some beautiful tract 
of level ground containing from five to twenty 
acres, and situated near a flourishing town and 
its ramifying turnpikes. This track must be 
enclosed by a high wooden paling, with here 
and there entrance gates for stock and pedes- 
trians and vehicles, guarded by gate-keepers. 
And within this enclosure appeared in quick 
succession all the varied accessories that went 
to make up a typical Kentucky fair near the 
close of the old social regime ; that is, before 
the outbreak of the Civil War. 
i 129 



Kentucky Fairs 

Here were found the hundreds of neat stalls 
for the different kinds of stock ; the gay booths 
under the colonnade of the amphitheatre for 
refreshments ; the spacious cottages for wom- 
en and invalids and children ; the platforms of 
the quack - doctors ; the floral hall and the 
pagoda - like structure for the musicians and 
the judges ; the tables and seats for private din- 
ing ; the high swings and the turnabouts ; the 
tests of the strength of limb and lung ; the 
gaudy awnings for the lemonade venders ; the 
huge brown hogsheads for iced - water, with 
bright tin cups dangling from the rim ; the 
circus ; and, finally, all those tented spectacles 
of the marvellous, the mysterious, and the 
monstrous which were to draw popular atten- 
tion to the Kentucky fair, as they had- been 
the particular delight of the fair-going thou- 
sands in England hundreds of years before. 

For you will remember that the Kentucky 
fair has ceased by this time to be a cattle- 
show. It has ceased to be simply a place for 
the annual competitive exhibition of stock 
of all kinds, which, by-the-way, is beginning to 
make the country famous. It has ceased to be 
even the harvest-home of the Blue-grass Re- 
gion, the mild autumnal saturnalia of its rural 
population. Whatever the people can discover 
or invent is indeed here ; or whatever they 
130 



Kentucky Fairs 

own, or can produce from the bountiful earth, 
or take from orchard or flower-garden, or make 
in dairy, kitchen, or loom-room. But the fair 
is more than all this now. It has become the 
great yearly pleasure-ground of the people as- 
sembled for a week's festivities. It is what the 
European fair of old was — the season of the 
happiest and most general intercourse between 
country and- town. Here the characteristic 
virtues and vices of the local civilization will 
be found in open flower side by side, and types 
and manners painted to the eye in vividest 
colorings. 

Crowded picture of a time gone by ! Bright 
glancing pageantry of life, moving on with 
feasting and music and love - making to the 
very edge of the awful precipice, over which 
its social system and its richly nurtured ideals 
will be dashed to pieces below ! — why not pause 
an instant over its innocent mirth and quick, 
awful tragedies ? 



IV 



THE fair has been in progress several days, 
and this will be the greatest day of all : 
nothing shown from morning till night 
but horses — horses in harness, horses under the 
saddle. Ah ! but that will be worth seeing ! 
Late in the afternoon the little boys will ride 
for premiums on their ponies, and, what is not 
so pretty, but far more exciting, young men 
will contest the prize of horsemanship. And 
then such racking and pacing and loping and 
walking ! — such racing round and round and 
round to see who can go fastest, and be grace- 
fulest, and turn quickest ! Such pirouetting 
and curveting and prancing and cavorting and 
riding with arms folded across the breast while 
the reins lie on the horse's neck, and suddenly 
bowing over to the horse's mane, as some queen 
of beauty high up in the amphitheatre, trans- 
ported by the excitement of the thousands of 
spectators and the closeness of the contest, 
throws her flowers and handkerchief down 
132 



Kentucky Fairs 

into the arena ! Ah, yes ! this will be the 
great day at the fair — at the modern tourney ! 

So the tide of the people is at the flood. For 
days they have been pouring into the town. 
The hotels are overflowing with strangers ; the 
open houses of the citizens are full of guests. 
Strolling companies of players will crack the 
dusty boards to-night with the tread of buskin 
and cothurnus. The easy-going tradespeople 
have trimmed their shops, and imported from 
the North their richest merchandise. 

From an early hour of the morning, along 
every road that leads from country or town to 
the amphitheatre, pour the hurrying throng of 
people, eager to get good seats for the day ; 
for there will be thousands not seated at all. 
Streaming out, on the side of the town, are pe- 
destrians, hacks, omnibuses, the negro drivers 
shouting, racing, cracking their whips, and 
sometimes running into the way -side stands 
where old negro women are selling apples and 
gingerbread. Streaming in, on the side of the 
country, are pedestrians, heated, their coats 
thrown over the shoulder or the arm ; buggies 
containing often a pair of lovers who do not 
keep their secret discreetly ; family carriages 
with children made conspicuously tidy and 
mothers aglow with the recent labors of the 
kitchen : comfortable evidences of which are 
i33 



Kentucky Fairs 

the huge baskets or hampers that are piled up 
in front or strapped on behind. Nay, some- 
times may be seen whole wagon-loads of pro- 
visions moving slowly in, guarded by portly 
negresses, whose eyes shine like black diamonds 
through the setting of their white-dusted eye- 
lashes. 

Within the grounds, how rapidly the crowd 
swells and surges hither and thither, tasting 
the pleasures of the place before going to the 
amphitheatre : to the stalls, to the booths, to 
the swings, to the cottage, to the floral hall, to 
the living curiosities, to the swinish pundits, 
who have learned their lessons in numbers 
and cards. Is not that the same pig that was 
shown at Bartholomew's four centuries ago ? 
Mixed in with the Kentuckians are people of a 
different build and complexion. For Kentucky 
now is one of the great summering States for 
the extreme Southerners, who come up with 
their families to its watering-places. Others 
who are scattered over the North return in the 
autumn by way of Kentucky, remaining till 
the fair and the fall of the first frost. Nay, is 
not the State the place for the reunion of fam- 
ilies that have Southern members? Back to 
the old home from the rice and sugar and cot- 
ton plantations of the swamps and the bayous 
come young Kentucky wives with Southern 
i34 



Kentucky Fairs 

husbands, young Kentucky husbands with 
Southern wives. All these are at the fair — 
the Lexington fair. Here, too, are strangers 
from wellnigh every Northern State. And, I 
beg you, do not overlook the negroes — a solid 
acre of them. They play unconsciously a great 
part in. the essential history of this scene and 
festival. Briskly grooming the stock in the 
stalls ; strolling around with carriage whips in 
their hands ; running on distant errands ; 
showering a tumult of blows upon the newly 
arrived " boss " with their nimble, ubiquitous 
brush-brooms ; everywhere, everywhere, happy, 
well-dressed, sleek — the fateful background of 
all this stage of social history. 

But the amphitheatre ! Through the mild, 
chastened, soft-toned atmosphere of the early 
September day the sunlight falls from the un- 
clouded sky upon the seated thousands. Ah, 
the women in all their silken and satin bravery ! 
delicate blue and pink and canary - colored 
petticoats, with muslin over-dresses, black lace 
and white lace mantles, white kid gloves, and 
boots to match the color of their petticoats. 
One stands up to allow a lemonade-seller to 
pass ; she wears a hoop-skirt twelve feet in 
circumference. Here and there costumes 
suitable for a ball ; arms and shoulders glisten- 
ing like marble in the sunlight ; gold chains 
i35 



Kentucky Fairs 

around the delicate arching necks. Oh, the 
jewels, the flowers, the fans, the parasols, the 
ribbons, the soft eyes and smiles, the love and 
happiness ! And some of the complexions ! — 
paint on the cheeks, powder on the neck, stick- 
pomatum plastering the beautiful hair down 
over the temples. No matter ; it is the fashion. 
Rub it in ! Rub it in well — up to the very- 
roots of the hair and eyebrows ! Now, how 
perfect you are, madam ! You are the great 
Kentucky show of life-size wax-works. 

In another part of the amphitheatre noth- 
ing but men, red-faced, excited, standing up 
on the seats, shouting, applauding, as the ri- 
val horses rush round the ring before them. 
It is not difficult to know who these are. The 
money streams through their fingers. Did 
you hear the crack of that pistol ? How the 
crowd swarms angrily. Stand back ! A man 
has been shot. He insulted a gentleman. He 
called him a liar. Be careful. There are a 
great many pistols on the fair grounds. 

In all the United States where else is there 
to be seen any such holiday assemblage of 
people — any such expression of the national 
life impressed with local peculiarities? Where 
else is there to be seen anything that, while it 
falls far behind, approaches so near the spirit 
of uproarious merriment, of reckless fun, which 
136 



Kentucky Fairs 

used to intoxicate and madden the English 
populace when given over to the sports of a 
ruder age ? 

These are the descendants of the sad pio- 
neers — of those early cavalcades which we 
glanced at in the primeval forests a few min- 
utes ago. These have subdued the land, and 
are reclining on its tranquil autumn fulness. 
Time enough to play now — more time than 
there ever was before ; more than there will 
ever be 'again. They have established their 
great fair here on the very spot where their 
forefathers were massacred or put to torture. 
So, at old Smithfield, the tumblers, the jesters, 
the buffoons, and the dancers shouldered each 
other in joyful riot over the ashes of the earlier 
heroes and martyrs. 

It is past high noon, and the thousands 
break away from the amphitheatre and move 
towards a soft green woodland in another part 
of the grounds, shaded by forest trees. Here 
are the private dinner - tables — hundreds of 
them, covered with snowy linen, glittering 
with glass and silver. You have heard of 
Kentucky hospitality ; here you will see one 
of the peaceful battle-fields where reputation 
for that virtue is fought for and won. Is there 
a stranger among these thousands that has 
not been hunted up and provided for ? And 
i37 



Kentucky Fairs 

such dinners ! Old Pepys should be here — 
immortal eater — so that he could go home and 
set down in his diary, along with other gastro- 
nomic adventures, garrulous notes of what he 
saw eaten and ate himself at the Kentucky 
fair. You will never see the Kentuckians 
making a better show than at this moment. 
What courtesy, what good-will, what warm and 
gracious manners ! Tie a blue ribbon on them. 
In a competitive exhibition of this kind the 
premium will stay at home. 

But make the most of it— make the most of 
this harmony. For did you see that? A 
father and a son met each other, turned their 
heads quickly and angrily away, and passed 
without speaking. 

Look how these two men shake hands with 
too much cordiality, and search each other's 
eyes. There is a man from the North stand- 
ing apart and watching with astonishment 
these alert, happy, efficient negroes — perhaps 
following with his thoughtful gaze one of Mrs. 
Stowe's Uncle Toms. A Southerner has drawn 
that Kentucky farmer beside a tree, and is 
trying to buy one of these servants for his 
plantation. Yes, yes, make the most of it ! 
The war is coming. It is in men's hearts, and 
in their eyes and consciences. By-and-by this 
bright, gay pageant will pass so entirely away 
138 



Kentucky Fairs 

that even the thought of it will come back to 
one like the unsubstantial revelry oi a dream. 
By and by there will be anothei throng filling 
these .".) ound i not in pink and white and 
canary, but in blue, solid blue blue o 
showing sad and < old above th< All 

round the amphitheatre tents will be spread 
not covei ing, as now, the hideous and the mon 
'.i,i ous, but the sleeping foi ms oi young men, 
athletic, sinewy, beautiful. This, too, shall 
vanish. And some day, when the fierce sum 
jn'-.r sun is killing the little gray leaves and 
blades oi gi as ., in through the te des< i ted 
gal es will pass a long ■■ e line of 

brown, I \o\ hing in the floral hall now but 
cots, around which are nurses and weeping 
women. Lying there, some poor young fellow, 
with the death dew on his forehead, will open 
his shadowy eyes and remember this Hay of 
the fair, where he walked among the flo 
and made love. 

But it is late in the afternoon, and the peo- 
ple are beginning to disperse by turnpike and 
lane to their homes in the country, or to 
hasten back into town for the festivities oi 
the night; for to-night the spirit of the fair 
will be continued in other amphitheatres. To 
night comedy and tragedy will tread the vil- 
lage boards; but hand in hand also they will 
' 39 



Kentucky Fairs 

flaunt their colors through the streets, and 
haunt the midnight alleys. In all the year no 
time like fair-time : parties at private houses ; 
hops, balls at the hotels. You shall sip the 
foam from the very crest of the wave of revelry 
and carousal. Darkness be over it till the east 
reddens ! Let Bacchus be unconfined ! 



THE fair languished during the war, but 
the people were not slow to revive it 
upon the return of peace. Peace, how- 
ever, could never bring back the fair of the 
past : it was gone forever— gone with the stage 
and phase of the social evolution of which it 
was the unique and memorable expression. 
For there was no phase of social evolution in 
Kentucky but felt profoundly that era of up- 
heaval, drift, and readjustment. Start where 
we will, or end where we may, we shall always 
come sooner or later to the war as a great rent 
and chasm, with its hither side and its farther 
side and its deep abyss between, down into 
which old things were dashed to death, and out 
of which new things were born into the better 

life. 

Therefore, as we study the Kentucky fair of 

to-day, more than a quarter of a century later, 

we must expect to find it much changed. 

Withal it has many local variations. As it is 

141 



Kentucky Fairs 

held here and there in retired counties or by 
little neighborhoods it has characteristics of 
rural picturesqueness that suggest the manners 
of the era passed away. But the typical Ken- 
tucky fair, the fair that represents the leading 
interests and advanced ideas of the day, bears 
testimony enough to the altered life of the 
people. 

The old circular amphitheatre has been torn 
down, and replaced with a straight or a slightly 
curved bank of seats. Thus we see the arena 
turned into the race-course, the idea of the 
Colosseum giving way to the idea of the Circus 
Maximus. In front of the bank of seats stretch 
a small track for the exhibition of different 
kinds of stock, and a large track for the races. 
This abandonment of the old form of amphi- 
theatre is thus a significant concession to the 
trotting-horse, and a sign that its speed has 
become the great pleasure of the fair. 

As a picture, also, the fair of to-day lacks the 
Tyrolean brightness of its predecessors ; and 
as a social event it seems like a pensive tale 
of by -gone merriment. Society no longer 
looks upon it as the occasion of displaying 
its wealth, its toilets, its courtesies, its hospi- 
talities. No such gay and splendid dresses 
now ; no such hundreds of dinner-tables on the 
shaded greensward. It would be too much to 
142 



Kentucky Fairs 

say that the disappearance of the latter be- 
tokens the loss of that virtue which the gra- 
cious usages of a former time made a byword. 
The explanation lies elsewhere. Under the old 
social regime a common appurtenance to every 
well-established household was a trained force 
of negro servants. It was the services of these 
that made the exercise of generous public en- 
tertainment possible to the Kentucky house- 
wife. Moreover, the lavish ideals of the time 
threw upon economy the reproach of mean- 
ness ; and, as has been noted, the fair was then 
the universally recognized time for the dis- 
play of munificent competitive hospitalities. In 
truth, it was the sharpness of the competition 
that brought in at last the general disuse of the 
custom ; for the dinners grew more and more 
sumptuous, the labor of preparing them more 
and more severe, and the expense of paying 
for them more and more burdensome. So to- 
day the Kentuckians remain a hospitable peo- 
ple, but you must not look to find the noblest 
exercise of their hospitality at the fair. A few 
dinners you will see, but modest luncheons are 
not despicable, and the whole tendency of 
things is towards the understanding that an 
appetite is an affair of the private conscience. 
And this brings to light some striking differ- 
ences between the old and the new Kentuck- 
i43 



Kentucky Fairs 

ians. Along with the circular amphitheatre, 
the dresses, and the dinners, have gone the 
miscellaneous amusements of which the fair 
was erewhile the mongrel scene and centre. 
The ideal fair of to-day frowns upon the side- 
show, and discards every floating accessory. 
It would be self-sufficient. It would say to 
the thousands of people who still attend it as 
the greatest of all their organized pleasures, 
" Find your excitement, your relaxation, your 
happiness, in a shed for machinery, a floral 
hall, and the fine stock." But of these the 
greatest attraction is the last, and of all kinds 
of stock the one most honored is the horse. 
Here, then, we come upon a noteworthy fact : 
the Kentucky fair, which began as a cattle-show, 
seems likely to end with being a horse-show. 

If anything is lacking to complete the con- 
trast between the fair in the fulness of its 
development before the war and the fair of 
to-day, what better could be found to reflect 
this than the different morale of the crowd ? 

You are a stranger, and you have the im- 
pression that an assemblage of ten, fifteen, 
twenty thousand Kentuckians out on a holi- 
day is pervaded by the spirit of a mob. You 
think that a few broken heads is one of its 
cherished traditions ; that intoxication and 
disorderliness are its dearest prerogatives. But 
144 



Kentucky Fairs 

nowadays you look in vain for those heated, 
excited men with money lying between their 
fingers, who were once the rebuke and the 
terror of the amphitheatre. You look in vain > 
for heated, excited men of any kind : there 
are none. There is no drinking, no bullying, 
no elbowing, or shouldering, or swearing. 

While still in their nurses' arms you may 
sometimes see the young Kentuckians shown 
in the ring at the horse-fair for premiums. 
From their early years they are taken to the 
amphitheatre to enjoy its color, its fleetness, 
and its form. As little boys they ride for 
prizes. The horse is the subject of talk in the 
hotels, on the street corners, in the saloons, 
at the stables, on county court day, at the 
cross-roads and blacksmiths' shops, in country 
church-yards before the sermon. The barber, 
as he shaves his morning customer, gives him 
points on the races. There will be found many 
a group of gentlemen in whose presence to 
reveal an ignorance of famous horses and com- 
mon pedigrees will bring a blush to the cheek. 
Not to feel interested in such themes is to lay 
one's self open to a charge of disagreeable ec- 
centricity. The horse has gradually emerged 
into prominence until to-day it occupies the , 
foreground. 

k 145 



A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHER 
HOOD 



M' 



I 



ORE than two hundred and fifty years 
have passed since the Cardinal de 
Richelieu stood at the baptismal font 
as sponsor to a name that within the pale of 
the Church was destined to become more fa- 
mous than his own. But the world has well- 
nigh forgotten Richelieu's godson. Only the 
tireless student of biography now turns the 
pages that record his extraordinary career, 
ponders the strange unfolding of his moral 
nature, is moved by the deep pathos of his 
dying hours. Dominique Armand - Jean Le 
Bouthillier de Ranee! How cleverly, while 
scarcely out of short - clothes, did he puzzle 
the king's confessor with questions on Homer, 
and at the age of thirteen publish an edition 
of Anacreon ! Of ancient, illustrious birth, 
and heir to an almost ducal house, how ten- 
derly favored was he by Marie de Medicis ; 
happy - hearted, kindly, suasive, how idolized 
by a gorgeous court ! In what affluence of 
149 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

rich laces did he dress ; in what irresistible 
violet - colored close coats, with emeralds at 
his wristbands, a diamond on his finger, red 
heels on his shoes ! How nimbly he capered 
through the dance with a sword on his hip ! 
How bravely he planned quests after the man- 
ner of knights of the Round Table, meaning 
to take for himself the part of Lancelot ! How 
exquisitely, ardently, and ah ! how fatally he 
flirted with the incomparable ladies in the cir- 
cle of Madame de Rambouillet ! And with a 
zest for sport as great as his unction for the 
priestly office, how wittily — laying one hand 
on his heart and waving the other through the 
air — could he bow and say, "This morning I 
preached like an angel ; I'll hunt like the devil 
this afternoon !" 

All at once his life broke in two when half 
spent. He ceased to hunt like the devil, to 
adore the flesh, to scandalize the world ; and 
retiring to the ancient Abbey of La Trappe in 
Normandy — the sponsorial gift of his Emi- 
nence and favored by many popes — there un- 
dertook the difficult task of reforming the re- 
laxed Benedictines. The old abbey — situated 
in a great fog-covered basin encompassed by 
dense woods of beech, oak, and linden, and 
therefore gloomy, unhealthy, and forbidding 
— was in ruins. One ascended by means of a 
150 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

ladder from floor to rotting floor. The refec- 
tory had become a place where the monks 
assembled to play at bowls with worldlings. 
The dormitory, exposed to wind, rain, and snow, 
had been given up to owls. In the church the 
stones were scattered, the walls unsteady, the 
pavement was broken, the bell ready to fall. 
As a single solemn reminder of the vanished 
spirit of the place, which had been founded by 
St. Stephen and St. Bernard in the twelfth 
century, with the intention of reviving in 
the Western Church the bright examples of 
primitive sanctity furnished by Eastern sol- 
itaries of the third and fourth, one read over 
the door of the cloister the words of Jeremiah : 
" Se debit solitarins et tacclrit." The few monks 
who remained in the convent slept where they 
could, and were, as Chateaubriand says, in a 
state of ruins. They preferred sipping ratafia 
to reading their breviaries ; and when De 
Ranee undertook to enforce reform, they 
threatened to whip him for his pains. He, 
in turn, threatened them with the royal inter- 
ference, and they submitted. There, accord- 
ingly, he introduced a system of rules that a 
sybarite might have wept over even to hear 
recited ; carried into practice cenobitical aus- 
terities that recalled the models of pious anch- 
orities in Syria and Thebais ; and gave its 
151 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

peculiar meaning to the word "Trappist," a 
name which has since been taken by all Cis- 
tercian communities embracing the reform of 
the first monastery. 

In the retirement of this mass of woods and 
sky De Ranee passed the rest of his long life, 
doing nothing more worldly, so far as is now 
known, than quoting Aristophanes and Horace 
to Bossuet, and allowing himself to be enter- 
tained by Pellisson, exhibiting the accomplish- 
ments of his educated spider. There, in acute 
agony of body and perfect meekness of spirit, 
a worn and weary old man, with time enough 
to remember his youthful ardors and emeralds 
and illusions, he watched his mortal end draw 
slowly near. And there, asking to be buried 
in some desolate spot — some old battle-field — 
he died at last, extending his poor macerated 
body on the cross of blessed cinders and straw, 
and commending his poor penitent soul to the 
mercy of Heaven. 

A wonderful spectacle to the less fervid 
Benedictines of the closing seventeenth cen- 
tury must have seemed the work of De Ranee 
in that old Norman abbey ! A strange com- 
pany of human souls, attracted by the former 
distinction of the great abbot as well as by the 
peculiar vows of the institute, must have come 
together in its silent halls ! One hears many 
152 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

stories, in the lighter vein, regarding some 
of its inmates. Thus, there was a certain 
furious ex-trooper, lately reeking with blood, 
who got himself much commended by living 
on baked apples ; and a young nobleman who 
devoted himself to the work of washing daily 
the monastery spittoons. One Brother, the 
story runs, having one day said there was too 
much salt in his scalding -hot broth, imme- 
diately burst into tears of contrition for his 
wickedness in complaining ; and another went 
for so many years without raising his eyes 
that he knew not a new chapel had been built, 
and so quite cracked his skull one day against 
the wall of it. 

The abbey was an asylum for the poor and 
helpless, the shipwrecked, the conscience- 
stricken, and the broken-hearted — for that 
meditative type of fervid piety which for ages 
has looked upon the cloister as the true earth- 
ly paradise wherein to rear the difficult edifice 
of the soul's salvation. Much noble blood 
sought De Ranch's retreat to wash out its ter- 
rifying stains, and more than one reckless 
spirit went thither to take upon itself the 
yoke of purer, sweeter usages. 

De Ranee's work remains an influence in 
the world. His monastery and his reform con- 
stitute the true background of material and 
i53 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

spiritual fact against which to outline the pres- 
ent Abbey of La Trappe in Kentucky. Even 
when thus viewed, it seems placed where it is 
only by some freak of history. An abbey of 
La Trappe in Kentucky ! How inharmonious 
with every element of its environment appears 
this fragment of old French monastic life ! It 
is the twelfth century touching the last of the 
nineteenth — the Old World reappearing in the 
New. Here are French faces — here is the 
French tongue. Here is the identical white 
cowl presented to blessed St. Alberick in the 
forests of Burgundy nine hundred years ago. 
Here is the rule of St. Benedict, patriarch of 
the Western monks in the sixth century. 
When one is put out at the way-side station, 
amid woodlands and fields of Indian-corn, and, 
leaving the world behind him, turns his foot- 
steps across the country towards the abbey, 
more than a mile away, the seclusion of the re- 
gion, its ineffable quietude, the infinite isola- 
tion of the life passed by the silent brother- 
hood — all bring vividly before the mind the 
image of that ancient distant abbey with which 
this one holds connection so sacred and so 
close. Is it not the veritable spot in Norman- 
dy? Here, too, is the broad basin of retired 
country ; here the densely wooded hills, shut- 
ting it in from the world ; here the orchards 
i54 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

and vineyards and gardens of the ascetic 
devotees ; and, as the night falls from the low, 
blurred sky of gray, and cuts short a silent 
contemplation of the scene, here, too, one rinds 
one's self, like some belated traveller in the 
dangerous forests of old, hurrying on to reach 
the porter's lodge, and ask within the sacred 
walls the hospitality of the venerable abbot. 



II 



FOR nearly a century after the death of 
De Ranee it is known that his followers 
faithfully maintained his reform at La 
Trappe. Then the French Revolution drove 
the Trappists as wanderers into various coun- 
tries, and the abbey was made a foundery for 
cannon. A small branch of the order came in 
1804 to the United States, and established it- 
self for a while in Pennsylvania, but soon turn- 
ed its eyes towards the greater wilds and soli- 
tudes of Kentucky. For this there was rea- 
son. Kentucky was early a great pioneer of 
the Catholic Church in the United States. 
Here the first episcopal see of the West was 
erected, and Bardstown held spiritual jurisdic- 
tion, within certain parallels of latitude, over 
all States and Territories between the two 
oceans. Here, too, were the first Catholic mis- 
sionaries of the West, except those who were 
to be found in the French stations along the 
Wabash and the Mississippi. Indeed, the Cath- 
156 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

olic population of Kentucky, which was prin- 
cipally descended from the colonists of Lord 
Baltimore, had begun to enter the State as 
early as 1775, the nucleus of their settlements 
soon becoming Nelson County, the locality of 
the present abbey. Likewise it should be re- 
membered that the Catholic Church in the 
United States, especially that portion of it in 
Kentucky, owes a great debt to the zeal of 
the exiled French clergy of early days. That 
buoyancy and elasticity of the French charac- 
ter, which naturally adapts it to every circum- 
stance and emergency, was then most demanded 
and most efficacious. From these exiles the 
infant missions of the State were supplied with 
their most devoted laborers. 

Hither, accordingly, the Trappists removed 
from Pennsylvania, establishing themselves on 
Pottinger's Creek, near Rohan's Knob, several 
miles from the present site. But they remained 
only a few years. The climate of Kentucky was 
ill-suited to their life of unrelaxed asceticism ; 
their restless superior had conceived a desire to 
christianize Indian children, and so removed 
the languishing settlement to Missouri. There 
is not space for following the solemn march of 
those austere exiles through the wildernesses 
of the New World. From Missouri they went 
to an ancient Indian burying-ground in Illinois, 
157 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

and there built up a sort of village in the heart 
of the prairie ; but the great mortality from 
which they suffered, and the subsidence of the 
fury of the French Revolution recalled them in 
1813 to France, to reoccupy the establishments 
from which they had been banished. 

It was of this body that Dickens, in his 
American Notes, wrote as follows: 

Looming up in the distance, as we rode along, was 
another of the ancient Indian burial-places, called 
Monk's Mound, in memory of a body of fanatics of 
the order of La Trappe, who founded a desolate con- 
vent there many years ago, when there were no settle- 
ments within a thousand miles, and were all swept of! 
by the pernicious climate; in which lamentable fatal- 
ity few rational people will suppose, perhaps, that 
society experienced any very severe deprivation. 

This is a better place in which to state a 
miracle than discuss it ; and the following ac- 
count of a heavenly portent, which is related to 
have been vouchsafed the Trappists while so- 
journing in Kentucky, may be given without 
comment : 

In the year 1808 the moon, being then about two- 
thirds full, presented a most remarkable appearance. 
A bright, luminous cross, clearly defined, was seen in 
the heavens, with its arms intersecting the centre of 
the moon. On each side two smaller crosses were 
also distinctly visible, though the portions of them 
158 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

most distant from the moon were more faintly marked. 
This strange phenomenon continued for several hours, 
and was witnessed by the Trappists on their arising, as 
usual, at midnight, to sing the Divine praise. 

The present monastery, which is called the 
Abbey of Gethsemane, owes its origin immedi- 
ately to the Abbey of La Meilleraye, of the de- 
partment of the Loire-Inferieure, France. The 
abbot of the latter had concluded arrangements 
with the French Government to found a house 
in the island of Martinique, on an estate grant- 
ed by Louis Philippe ; but this monarch's rule 
having been overturned, the plan was aban- 
doned in favor of a colony in the United States. 
Two Fathers, with the view of selecting a site, 
came to New York in the summer of 1848, and 
naturally turned their eyes to the Catholic set- 
tlements in Kentucky, and to the domain of the 
pioneer Trappists. In the autumn of that year, 
accordingly, about forty - five " religious " left 
the mother-abbey of La Meilleraye, set sail from 
Havre de Grace for New Orleans, went thence 
by boat to Louisville, and from this poin t walked 
to Gethsemane, a distance of some sixty miles. 
Although scattered among various countries of 
Europe, the Trappists have but two convents 
in the United States — this, the oldest, and one 
near Dubuque, Iowa, a colony from the abbey 
in Ireland. 

159 



Ill 



THE domain of the abbey comprises some 
seventeen hundred acres of land, part of 
which is tillable, while the rest consists 
of a range of wooded knobs that furnish timber 
to the monastery steam saw-mill. Around this 
domain lie the homesteads of Kentucky farm- 
ers, who make indifferent monks. One leaves 
the public road that winds across the open 
country and approaches the monastery through 
a long, level avenue, enclosed on each side by a 
hedge-row of cedars, and shaded by nearly a 
hundred beautiful English elms, the offspring 
of a single parent stem. Traversing this dim, 
sweet spot, where no sound is heard but the 
waving of boughs and the softened notes of 
birds, one reaches the porter's lodge, a low, 
brick building, on each side of which extends 
the high brick-wall that separates the inner 
from the outer world. Passing beneath the 
archway of the lodge, one discovers a graceful 
bit of landscape gardening — walks fringed with 
1 60 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

cedars, beds for flowers, pathways so thickly 
strewn with sawdust that the heaviest footfall 
is unheard, a soft turf of green, disturbed only 
by the gentle shadows of the pious -looking 
Benedictine trees ; a fit spot for recreation and 
meditation. It is with a sort of worldly start 
that you come upon an enclosure at one end of 
these grounds wherein a populous family of 
white-cowled rabbits trip around in the most 
noiseless fashion, and seemed ashamed of being 
caught living together in family relations. 

Architecturally there is little to please the 
aesthetic sense in the monastery building, along 
the whole front of which these grounds extend. 
It is a great quadrangular pile of brick, three 
stories high, heated by furnaces and lighted by 
gas — modern appliances which heighten the 
contrast with the ancient life whose needs they 
subserve. Within the quadrangle is a green 
inner court, also beautifully laid off. On one 
side are two chapels, the one appropriated to 
the ordinary services of the Church, and en- 
tered from without the abbey-wall by all who 
desire ; the other, consecrated to the offices of 
the Trappist order, entered only from within, 
and accessible exclusively to males. It is here 
that one finds occasion to remember the Trap- 
pist's vow of poverty. The vestments are far 
from rich, the decorations of the altar far from 
l 161 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

splendid. The crucifixion-scene behind the 
altar consists of wooden figures carved by one 
of the monks now dead, and painted with lit- 
tle art. No tender light of many hues here 
streams through long windows rich with holy 
reminiscence and artistic fancy. The church 
has, albeit, a certain beauty of its own — that 
charm which is inseparable from fine proportion 
in stone and from gracefully disposed columns 
growing into the arches of the lofty roof. But 
the cold gray of the interior, severe and unre- 
lieved, bespeaks a place where the soul comes 
to lay itself in simplicity before the Eternal as 
it would upon a naked, solitary rock of the 
desert. Elsewhere in the abbey greater evi- 
dences of votive poverty occur — in the various 
statues and shrines of the Virgin, in the pict- 
ures and prints that hang in the main front 
corridor — in all that appertains to the material 
life of the community. 

Just outside the church, beneath the per- 
petual benediction of the cross on its spire, is 
the quiet cemetery garth, where the dead are 
side by side, their graves covered with myrtle 
and having each for its headstone a plain 
wooden crucifix bearing the religious name and 
station of him who lies below — Father Hon- 
orius, Father Timotheus, Brother Hilarius, 
Brother Eutropius. Who are they ? And 
162 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

whence? And by what familiar names were 
they greeted on the old play-grounds and battle- 
fields of the world ? 

The Trappists do not, as it is commonly 
understood, daily dig a portion of their own 
graves. When one of them dies and has been 
buried, a new grave is begun beside the one 
just filled, as a reminder to the survivors that 
one of them must surely take his place therein. 
So, too, when each seeks the cemetery enclos- 
ure, in hours of holy meditation, and, standing 
bareheaded among the graves, prays softly for 
the souls of his departed brethren, he may 
come for a time to this unfinished grave, and, 
kneeling, pray Heaven, if he be next, to dismiss 
his soul in peace. 

Nor do they sleep in the dark, abject kennel, 
which the imagination, in the light of mediaeval 
history, constructs as the true monk's cell. By 
the rule of St. Benedict, they sleep separate, 
but in the same dormitory— a great upper 
room, well lighted and clean, in the body of 
which a general framework several feet high is 
divided into partitions that look like narrow 
berths. 



IV 



WE have acquired poetical and pictorial 
conceptions of monks — praying with 
wan faces and upturned eyes half 
darkened by the shadowing cowl, the coarse 
serge falling away from the emaciated neck, 
the hands pressing the crucifix close to the 
heart; and with this type has been associated 
a certain idea of cloistral life — that it was an 
existence of vacancy and idleness, or at best of 
deep meditation of the soul broken only by 
express spiritual devotions. There is another 
kind of monk, with the marks of which we seem 
traditionally familiar : the monk with the rubi- 
cund face, sleek poll, good epigastric develop- 
ment, and slightly unsteady gait, with whom, 
in turn, we have connected a different phase 
of conventual discipline — fat capon and stubble 
goose, and midnight convivial chantings grow- 
ing ever more fast and furious, but finally dying 
away in a heavy stertorous calm. Poetry, art, 
the drama, the novel, have each portrayed 
164 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

human nature in orders ; the saint-like monk, 
the intellectual monk, the bibulous, the feloni- 
ous, the fighting monk (who loves not the her- 
mit of Copmanhurst ?), until the memory is 
stored and the imagination preoccupied. 

Living for a while in a Trappist monastery 
in modern America, one gets a pleasant actual 
experience of other types no less picturesque 
and on the whole much more acceptable. He 
finds himself, for one thing, brought face to 
face with the working monk. Idleness to the 
Trappist is the enemy of the soul, and one of 
his vows is manual labor. Whatever a monk's 
previous station may have been, he must per- 
form, according to abbatial direction, the most 
menial services. None are exempt from work ; 
there is no place among them for the sluggard. 
When it is borne in mind that the abbey is a 
self-dependent institution, where the healthy 
must be maintained, the sick cared for, the 
dead buried, the necessity for much work be- 
comes manifest. In fact, the occupations are 
as various as those of a modern factory. There 
is scope for intellects of all degrees and talents 
of wellnigh every order. Daily life, unremit- 
tingly from year to year, is an exact system 
of duties and hours. The building, covering 
about an acre of 'ground and penetrated by cor- 
ridors, must be kept faultlessly clean. There 
165 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

are three kitchens — one for the guests, one for 
the community, and one for the infirmary — 
that require each a coquinarius and separate 
assistants. There is a tinker's shop and a phar- 
macy ; a saddlery, where the broken gear used 
in cultivating the monastery lands is mended ; 
a tailor's shop, where the worn garments are 
patched ; a shoemaker's shop, where the coarse, 
heavy shoes of the monks are made and cob- 
bled ; and a barber's shop, where the Trappist 
beard is shaved twice a month and the Trap- 
pist head is monthly shorn. 

Out-doors the occupations are even more 
varied. The community do not till the farm. 
The greater part of their land is occupied by 
tenant farmers, and what they reserve for their 
own use is cultivated by the so-called " family 
brothers," who, it is due to say, have no fam- 
ilies, but live as celibates on the abbey domain, 
subject to the abbot's authority, without being 
members of the order. The monks, however, 
do labor in the ample gardens, orchards, and 
vineyard, from which they derive their suste- 
nance, in the steam saw-mill and grain-mill, 
in the dairy and the cheese factory. Thus 
picturesquely engaged one may find them in 
autumn : monks gathering apples and making 
pungent cider, which is stored away in the vast 
cellar as their only beverage except water ; 
1 66 




A FORTNIGHTLY SHAVE 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

monks repairing the shingle roof of a stable ; 
monks feeding the huge swine, which they 
fatten for the board of their carnal guests, or 
the fluttering multitude of chickens, from the 
eggs and young of which they derive a slender 
revenue ; monks grouped in the garden around 
a green and purple heap of turnips, to be stored 
up as a winter relish of no mean distinction. 

Amid such scenes one forgets all else while 
enjoying the wealth and freshness of artistic 
effects. What a picture is this young Belgian 
cheese -maker, his sleeves rolled above the 
elbows of his brawny arms, his great pinkish 
hands buried in the golden curds, the cap of 
his serge cloak falling back and showing his 
closely clipped golden-brown hair, blue eyes, 
and clear, delicate skin ! Or this Australian 
ex-farmer, as he stands by the hopper of grist 
or lays on his shoulder a bag of flour for the 
coarse brown-bread of the monks. Or this 
dark old French opera singer, who strutted his 
brief hour on many a European stage, but now 
hobbles around, hoary in his cowl and blanched 
with age, to pick up a handful of garlic. Or 
this athletic young Irishman, thrusting a great 
iron prod into the glowing coals of the saw- 
mill furnace. Or this slender Switzer, your at- 
tendant in the refectory, with great keys dang- 
ling from his leathern cincture, who stands by 
167 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

with folded hands and bowed head while you 
are eating the pagan meal he has prepared for 
you. 

From various countries of the Old World 
men find their way into the Abbey of Geth- 
semane, but among them are no Americans. 
Repeatedly the latter have joined the order, 
and have failed to persevere up to the final 
consecration of the white cowl. The fairest 
warning is given to the postulant. He is made 
to understand the entire extent of the obliga- 
tion he has assumed ; and only after passing 
through a novitiate, prolonged at the discre- 
tion of the abbot, is he admitted to the vows 
that must be kept unbroken till death. 



FROM the striking material aspects of 
their daily life, one is soon recalled to a 
sense of their subordination to spiritual 
aims and pledges ; for upon them, like a spell 
of enchantment, lies the sacred silence. The 
honey has been taken from the bees with solem- 
nity ; the grapes have been gathered without 
song and mirth. The vow of life-long silence 
taken by the Trappist must of course not be 
construed literally; but there are only two oc- 
casions during which it is completely set aside 
— when confessing his sins and when singing 
the offices of the Church. At all other times 
his tongue becomes, as far as possible, a super- 
fluous member ; he speaks only by permission 
of his superior, and always simply and to the 
point. The monk at work with another ex- 
changes with him only the few low, necessary 
words, and those that provoke no laughter. 
Of the three so-called monastic graces, Sim- 
plicitas, Bcnignitas, Hilaritas, the last is not 
169 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

his. Even for necessary speech he is taught 
to substitute a language of signs, as fully sys- 
tematized as the speech of the deaf and dumb. 
Should he, while at work, wound his fellow- 
workman, sorrow may be expressed by strik- 
ing his breast. A desire to confess is shown 
by lifting one hand to the mouth and striking 
the breast with the other. The maker of 
cheese crosses two fingers at the middle point 
to let you know that it is made half of milk 
and half of cream. The guest-master, whose 
business it is to act as your guide through the 
abbey and the grounds, is warily mindful of 
his special functions and requests you to ad- 
dress none but him. Only the abbot is free to 
speak when and as his judgment may approve. 
It is silence, says the Trappist, that shuts out 
new ideas, worldly topics, controversy. It is 
silence that enables the soul to contemplate 
with singleness and mortification the infinite 
perfections of the Eternal. 

In the abbey it is this pervasive hush that 
falls like a leaden pall upon the stranger 
who has rushed in from the talking universe. 
Are these priests modern survivals of the 
rapt solitaries of India? The days pass, and 
the world, which seemed in hailing distance 
to you at first, has receded to dim remote- 
ness. You stand at the window of your room 
170 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

looking out, and hear in the autumn trees 
only the flute -like note of some migratory- 
bird, passing slowly on towards the south. 
You listen within, and hear but a key turning 
in distant locks and the slow-retreating foot- 
steps of some dusky figure returning to its 
lonely self-communings. The utmost precau- 
tion is taken to avoid noise ; in the dormitory 
not even your guide will speak to you, but ex- 
plains by gesture and signs. During the short 
siesta the Trappists allow themselves, if one 
of them, not wishing to sleep, gets permission 
to read in his so-called cell, he must turn the 
pages of his book inaudibly. In the refectory, 
while the meal is eaten and the appointed 
reader in the tribune goes through a service, 
if one through carelessness makes a noise by 
so much as dropping a fork or a spoon, he 
leaves his seat and prostrates himself on the 
floor until bidden by the superior to arise. 
The same penance is undergone in the church 
by any one who should distract attention with 
the clasp of his book. 

A hard life, to purely human seeming, does 
the Trappist make for the body. He thinks 
nothing of it. It is his evil tenement of flesh, 
whose humors are an impediment to sanctifi- 
cation, whose propensities are to be kept down 
by the practice of austerities. To it in part his 
171 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

monastic vows are addressed — perpetual and 
utter poverty, chastity, manual labor, silence, 
seclusion, penance, obedience. The perfections 
and glories of his monastic state culminate in 
the complete abnegation and destruction of 
animal nature, and in the correspondence of 
his earthly life with the holiness of divine in- ' 
struction. The war of the Jesuit is with the 
world ; the war of the Trappist is with himself. 
From his narrow bed, on which are simply a 
coarse thin mattress, pillow, sheet, and coverlet, 
he rises at two o'clock, on certain days at one, 
on others yet at twelve. He has not undressed, 
but has slept in his daily garb, with the cincture 
around his waist. 

This dress consists, if he be a brother, of the 
roughest dark-brown serge-like stuff, the over- 
garment of which is a long robe ; if a Father, 
of a similar material, but white in color, the 
over-garment being the cowl, beneath which 
is the black scapular. He changes it only once 
in two weeks. The frequent use of the bath, 
as tending to luxuriousness, is forbidden him, 
especially if he be young. His diet is vege- 
tables, fruit, honey, cider, cheese, and brown- 
bread. Only when sick or infirm may he take 
even fish or eggs. His table-service is pewter, 
plain earthenware, a heavy wooden spoon and 
fork of his own making, and the bottom of a 
172 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

broken bottle for a salt-cellar. If he wears 
the white cowl, he eats but one such frugal 
repast a day during part of the year ; if the 
brown robe, and therefore required to do more 
work, he has besides this meal an early morn- 
ing luncheon called "mixt." He renounces 
all claim to his own person, all right over his 
own powers. " I am as wax," he exclaims ; 
"mould me as you will." By the law of his 
patron saint, if commanded to do things too 
hard, or even impossible, he must still under- 
take them. 

For the least violations of the rules of his 
order ; for committing a mistake while recit- 
ing a psalm, responsory, antiphon, or lesson ; 
for giving out one note instead of another, or 
saying dominus instead of domino; for break- 
ing or losing anything, or committing any 
fault while engaged in any kind of work in 
kitchen, pantry, bakery, garden, trade, or busi- 
ness — he must humble himself and make pub- 
lic satisfaction forthwith. Nay, more : each 
by his vows is forced to become his brother's 
keeper, and to proclaim him publicly in the 
community chapter for the slightest overt 
transgression. For charity's sake, however, 
he may not judge motives nor make vague 
general charges. 

The Trappist does not walk beyond the en- 
i73 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

closures except by permission. He must re- 
press ineffably tender yearnings that visit and 
vex the human heart in this life. The death 
of the nearest kindred is not announced to 
him. Forgotten by the world, by him it is 
forgotten. Yet not wholly. When he lays 
the lashes of the scourge on his flesh— it may 
be on his carious bones — he does it not for his 
own sins alone, but for the sins of the whole 
world; and in his searching, self-imposed 
humiliations, there is a silent, broad out-reach- 
ing of sympathetic effort in behalf of all his 
kind. Sorrow may not depict itself freely on 
his face. If a suffering invalid, he must mani- 
fest no interest in the progress of his malady, 
feel no concern regarding the result. In his 
last hour, he sees ashes strewn upon the floor 
in the form of a cross, a thin scattering of 
straw made over them, and his body extended 
thereon to die ; and from this hard bed of 
death he knows it will be borne on a bier by 
his brethren and laid in the grave without 
coffin or shroud. 



VI 



BUT who can judge such a life save him 
who has lived it? Who can say what 
undreamt-of spiritual compensations 
may not come even in this present time as a 
reward for bodily austerities ? What fine real- 
ities may not body themselves forth to the eye 
of the soul, strained of grossness, steadied from 
worldly agitation, and taught to gaze year after 
year into the awfulness and mystery of its own 
being and deep destiny ? " Monasticism," says 
Mr. Froude, " we believe to have been the real- 
ization of the infinite loveliness and beauty of 
personal purity ; and the saint in the desert 
was the apotheosis of the spiritual man." How- 
ever this may be, here at Gethsemane you see 
one of the severest expressions of its faith that 
the soul has ever given, either in ancient or in 
modern times ; and you cease to think of these 
men as members of a religious order, in the 
study of them as exponents of a common hu- 
manity struggling with the problem of its rela- 
i75 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

tion to the Infinite. One would wish to lay 
hold upon the latent elements of power and 
truth and beauty in their system which enables 
them to say with quiet cheerfulness, u We are 
happy, perfectly happy." 

Excepting this ceaseless war between flesh 
and spirit, the abbey seems a peaceful place. 
Its relations with the outside world have always 
been kindly. During the Civil War it was un- 
disturbed by the forces of each army. Food 
and shelter it has never denied even to the 
poorest, and it asks no compensation, accept- 
ing such as the stranger may give. The savor 
of good deeds extends beyond its walls, and near 
by is a free school under its control, where for 
more than a quarter of a century boys of all 
creeds have been educated. 

There comes some late autumnal afternoon 
when you are to leave the place. With a strange 
feeling of farewell, you grasp the hands of those 
whom you have been given the privilege of 
knowing, and step slowly out past the meek 
sacristan, past the noiseless garden, past the 
porter's lodge and the misplaced rabbits, past 
the dim avenue of elms, past the great iron gate- 
way, and, walking along the sequestered road 
until you have reached the summit of a wood- 
ed knoll half a mile away, turn and look back. 
Half a mile! The distance is infinite. The 
176 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

last rays of the sun seem hardly able to reach 
the pale cross on the spire which anon fades 
into the sky; and the monastery bell, that 
sends its mellow tones across the shadowy land- 
scape, is rung from an immemorial past. 

It is the hour of the Compline, the Salve, and 
the Angelus — the last of the seven services that 
the Trappist holds between two o'clock in the 
morning and this hour of early nightfall. Stand- 
ing alone in the silent darkness you allow im- 
agination to carry you once more into the 
church. You sit in one of the galleries and look 
down upon the stalls of the monks ranged along 
the walls of the nave. There is no light except 
the feeble gleam of a single low red cresset that 
swings ever-burning before the altar. You can 
just discern a long line of nameless dusky fig- 
ures creep forth from the deeper gloom and glide 
noiselessly into their seats. You listen to the 
cantns plemis gravitate — those long, level notes 
with sorrowful cadences and measured pauses, 
sung by a full, unfaltering chorus of voices, old 
and young. It is the song that smote the heart 
of Bossuet with such sadness in the desert of 
Normandy two and a half centuries ago. 

Anon by some unseen hand two tall candles 
are lighted on the altar. The singing is hush- 
ed. From the ghostly line of white-robed Fa- 
thers a shadowy figure suddenly moves towards 
m 177 



A Home of the Silent Brotherhood 

the spot in the middle of the church where the 
bell-rope hangs, and with slow, weird move- 
ments rings the solemn bell until it fills the 
cold, gray arches with quivering sound. One 
will not in a lifetime forget the impressiveness 
of the scene — the long tapering shadows that 
stretch out over the dimly lighted, polished 
floor from this figure silhouetted against the 
brighter light from the altar beyond ; the bowed, 
moveless forms of the monks in brown almost 
indiscernible in the gloom ; the spectral glam- 
our reflected from the robes of the bowed Fa- 
thers in white ; the ghastly, suffering scene of 
the Saviour, strangely luminous in the glare of 
the tall candles. It is the daily climax in the 
devotions of the Old World monks at Geth- 
semane. 



HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 



KENTUCKY is a land of rural homes. 
The people are out in the country with 
a perennial appetite and passion for the 
soil. Like Englishmen, they are by nature no 
dwellers in cities ; like older Saxon forefathers, 
they have a strong feeling for a habitation even 
no better than a one-story log-house, with fur- 
niture of the rudest kind, and cooking in the 
open air, if, only, it be surrounded by a plot of 
ground and individualized by all-encompassing 
fences. They are gregarious at respectful dis- 
tances, dear to them being that sense of per- 
sonal worth and importance which comes from 
territorial aloofness, from domestic privacy, 
from a certain lordship over all they survey. 

The land they hold has a singular charm 
and power of infusing fierce, tender desire of 
ownership. Centuries before it was possessed 
by them, all ruthless aboriginal wars for its 
sole occupancy had resolved themselves into 
the final understanding that it be wholly 
181 



Homesteads of the Blue- Grass 

claimed by none. Bounty in land was the 
coveted reward of Virginia troops in the old 
French and Indian war. Hereditary love of 
land drew the earliest settlers across the peril- 
ous mountains. Rapacity for land caused 
them to rush down into the green plains, fall 
upon the natives, slay, torture, hack to pieces, 
and sacrifice wife and child, with the swift, 
barbaric hardihood and unappeasable fury of 
Northmen of old descending upon the softer 
shores of France. Acquisition of land was the 
determinative principle of the new civilization. 
Litigation concerning land has made famous 
the decisions of their courts of law. The sur- 
veyor's chain should be wrapped about the 
rifle as a symbolic epitome of pioneer history. 
It was for land that they turned from the Ind- 
ians upon one another, and wrangled, cheat- 
ed, and lied. They robbed Boone until he had 
none left in which to lay his bones. One of 
the first acts of one of the first colonists was to 
glut his appetite by the purchase of all of the 
State that lies south of the Kentucky River. 
The middle-class land-owner has always been 
the controlling element of population. To-day 
more of the people are engaged in agriculture 
than in all other pursuits combined ; taste for 
it has steadily drawn a rich stream of younger 
generations hither and thither into the young- 
182 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

er West ; and to - day, as always, the broad, 
average ideal of a happy life is expressed in 
the quiet holding of perpetual pastures. 

Steam, said Emerson, is almost an English- 
man ; grass is almost a Kentuckian. Wealth, 
labor, productions, revenues, public markets, 
public improvements, manners, characters, 
social modes — all speak in common of the 
country, and fix attention upon the soil. The 
staples attest the predominance of agriculture ; 
unsurpassed breeds of stock imply the verdure 
of the woodlands ; turnpikes, the finest on the 
continent, furnish viaducts for the garnered 
riches of the earth, and prove the high develop- 
ment of rural life, the every-day luxury of de- 
lightful riding and driving. Even the crow, 
the most boldly characteristic freebooter of 
the air, whose cawing is often the only sound 
heard in dead February days, or whose flight 
amid his multitudinous fellows forms long 
black lines across the morning and the evening 
sky, tells of fat pickings and profitable thefts 
in innumerable fields. In Kentucky a rustic 
young woman of Homeric sensibility might be 
allowed to discover in the slow-moving pano- 
rama of white clouds her father's herd of short- 
horned cattle grazing through heavenly past- 
ures, and her lover to see in the halo around 
the moon a perfect celestial race-track. 
183 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

Comparatively weak and unpronounced are 
the features of urban life. The many little 
towns and villages scattered at easy distances 
over the State for the most part draw out a 
thin existence by reason of surrounding rural 
populations. They bear the pastoral stamp. 
Up to their very environs approach the culti- 
vated fields, the meadows of brilliant green, 
the delicate woodlands ; in and out along the 
white highways move the tranquil currents of 
rural trade; through their streets groan and 
creak the loaded wagons; on the sidewalks 
the most conspicuous human type is the owner 
of the soil. Once a month county-seats over- 
flow with the incoming tide of country folk, 
livery stables are crowded with horses and 
vehicles, court - house squares become market- 
places for traffic in stock. But when emptied 
of country folk, they sink again into repose, 
all but falling asleep of summer noonings, and 
in winter seeming frost-locked with the outly- 
ing woods and streams. 

Remarkable is the absence of considerable 
cities, there being but one that may be said 
truly to reflect Kentucky life, and that situ- 
ated on the river frontier, a hundred miles 
from the center of the State. Think of it ! A 
population of some two millions with only one 
interior town that contains over five thousand 
184 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

white inhabitants. Hence Kentucky makes 
no impression abroad by reason of its urban 
population. Lexington, Bowling Green, Har- 
rodsburg, Winchester, Richmond, Frankfort, 
Mount Sterling, and all the others, where do 
they stand in the scale of American cities? 
Hence, too, the disparaging contrast liable to 
be drawn between Kentucky and the gigantic 
young States of the West. Where is the mag- 
nitude of the commonwealth, where the ground 
of the sense of importance in the people ? No 
huge mills and gleaming forges, no din of fac- 
tories and throb of mines, nowhere any colos- 
sal centres for rushing, multiform American 
energy. The answer must be: Judge the 
State thus far as an agricultural State ; the 
people as an agricultural people. In time no 
doubt the rest will come. All other things 
are here, awaiting occasion and development. 
The eastern portions of the State now verge 
upon an era of long-delayed activity. There 
lie the mines, the building- stone, the illimit- 
able wealth of timbers ; there soon will be 
opened new fields for commercial and indus- 
trial centralization. But hitherto in Kentucky 
it has seemed enough that the pulse of life 
should beat with the heart of nature, and be 
in unison with the slow unfolding and deca- 
dence of the seasons. The farmer can go no 
185 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

faster than the sun, and is rich or poor by the 
law of planetary orbits. In all central Ken- 
tucky not a single village of note has been 
founded within three-quarters of a century, 
and some villages a hundred years old have 
not succeeded in gaining even from this fecund 
race more than a thousand or two thousand 
inhabitants. But these little towns are inac- 
cessible to the criticism that would assault 
their commercial greatness. Business is not 
their boast. Sounded to its depths, the serene 
sea in which their existence floats will reveal a 
bottom, not of mercantile, but of social ideas; 
studied as to cost or comfort, the architecture 
in which the people have expressed themselves 
will appear noticeable, not in their business 
houses and public buildings, but in their 
homes. If these towns pique themselves 
pointedly on anything, it is that they are the 
centres of genial intercourse and polite enter- 
tainment. Even commercial Louisville must 
find its peculiar distinction in the number of 
its sumptuous private residences. It is well- 
nigh a rule that in Kentucky the value of the 
house is out of proportion to the value of the 
estate. 

But if the towns regard themselves as the 
provincial fortresses of good society, they do 
not look down upon the home life of the coun- 
186 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

try. Between country and town in Kentucky 
exists a relation unique and well to be studied : 
such a part of the population of the town own- 
ing or managing estates in the country ; such 
a part of the population of the country being 
business or professional men in town. For it 
is strikingly true that here all vocations and 
avocations of life may and do go with tillage, 
and there are none it is not considered to adorn. 
The first Governor of the State was awarded 
his domain for raising a crop of corn, and laid 
down public life at last to renew his compan- 
ionship with the plough. " I retire," said Clay, 
many years afterwards, " to the shades of Ash- 
land." The present Governor (1888), a man of 
large wealth, lives, when at home, in a rural 
log-house built near the beginning of the cen- 
tury. His predecessor in office was a farmer. 
Hardly a man of note in all the past or present 
history of the State but has had his near or 
immediate origin in the woods and fields. 
Formerly it was the custom — less general now 
— that young men should take their academic 
degrees in the colleges of the United States, 
sometimes in those of Europe, and, returning 
home, hang up their diplomas as votive offer- 
ings to the god of boundaries. To-day you 
will find the ex-minister to a foreign court 
spending his final years in the solitude of his 
187 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

farm-house, and the representative at Wash- 
ington making his retreat to the restful home- 
stead. The banker in town bethinks him of 
stocks at home that know no panic ; the clergy- 
man studies St. Paul amid the native corn, and 
muses on the surpassing beauty of David as he 
rides his favorite horse through green pastures 
and beside still waters. 

Hence, to be a farmer here implies no social 
inferiority, no rusticity, no boorishness. Hence, 
so clearly interlaced are urban and rural so- 
ciety that there results a homogeneousness of 
manners, customs, dress, entertainments, ideals, 
and tastes. Hence, the infiltration of the coun- 
try with the best the towns contain. More, 
indeed, than this : rather to the country than 
to the towns in Kentucky must one look for the 
local history of the home life. There first was 
implanted under English and Virginian influ- 
ences the antique style of country-seat ; there 
flourished for a time gracious manners that 
were the high-born endowment of the olden 
school ; there in piquant contrast were devel- 
oped side by side the democratic and aristo- 
cratic spirits, working severally towards equal- 
ity and caste ; there was established the State 
reputation for effusive private hospitalities ; 
and there still are peculiarly cherished the 
fading traditions of more festive boards and 
188 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

kindlier hearthstones. If the feeling of the 
whole people could be interpreted by a single 
saying, it would perhaps be this : that whether 
in town or country — and if in the country, not 
remotely here or there, but in wellnigh un- 
broken succession from estate to estate — they 
have attained a notable stage in the civilization 
of the home. This is the common conviction, 
this the idol of the tribe. The idol itself may 
rest on the fact of provincial isolation, which 
is the fortress of self-love and neighborly 
devotion ; but it suffices for the present pur- 
pose to say that it is an idol still, worshipped 
for the divinity it is thought to enshrine. 
Hence, you may assail the Kentuckian on many 
grounds, and he will hold his peace. You may 
tell him that he has no great cities, that he does 
not run with the currents of national progress; 
but never tell him that the home life of his 
fellows and himself is not as good as the best 
in the land. Domesticity is the State porcu- 
pine, presenting an angry quill to every point 
of attack. To write of homes in Kentucky, 
therefore, and particularly of rural homes, is 
to enter the very citadel of the popular affec- 
tions. 



II 



AT first they built for the tribe, working to- 
/\ gether like beavers in common cause 
* *- against nature and their enemies. Home 
life and domestic architecture began among 
them with the wooden-fort community, the idea 
of which was no doubt derived from the frontier 
defences of Virginia, and modified by the Ken- 
tuckians with a view to domestic use. This 
building habit culminated in the erection of 
some two hundred rustic castles, the sites of 
which in some instances have been identified. 
It was a singularly fit sort of structure, ad- 
justing itself desperately and economically to 
the necessities of environment. For the time 
society lapsed into a state which, but for the 
want of lords and retainers, was feudalism of the 
rudest kind. There were gates for sally and 
swift retreat, bastions for defence, and loop- 
holes in cabin walls for deadly volleys. There 
were hunting-parties winding forth stealthily 
without horn or hound, and returning with 
190 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

game that would have graced the great feudal 
halls. There was siege, too, and suffering, and 
death enough, God knows, mingled with the 
lowing of cattle and the clatter of looms. Some 
morning, even, you might have seen a slight 
girl trip covertly out to the little cotton-patch 
in one corner of the enclosure, and, blushing 
crimson over the snowy cotton-bolls, pick the 
wherewithal to spin her bridal dress; for in 
these forts they married also and bore children. 
Many a Kentucky family must trace its origin 
through the tribal communities pent up within 
a stockade, and discover that the family plate 
consisted then of a tin cup, and, haply, an iron 
fork. 

But, as soon as might be, this compulsory 
village life broke eagerly asunder into private 
homes. The common building form was that 
of the log-house. It is needful to distinguish 
this from the log -house of the mountaineer, 
which is found throughout eastern Kentucky 
to-day. Encompassed by all difficulties, the 
pioneer yet reared himself a better, more en- 
during habitation. One of these, still intact 
after the lapse of more than a century, stands 
as a singularly interesting type of its kind, and 
brings us face to face with primitive architec- 
ture. " Mulberry Hill," a double house, two and 
a half stories high, with a central hall, was built 
191 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

in Jefferson County, near Louisville, in 1785, 
for John Clark, the father of General George 
Rogers Clark. 

The settlers made the mistake of supposing 
that the country lacked building-stone, so deep 
under the loam and verdure lay the whole 
foundation rock ; but soon they discovered that 
their better houses had only to be taken from 
beneath their feet. The first stone house in the 
State, and withal the most notable, is " Travel- 
ler's Rest," in Lincoln County, built in 1783 by 
Governor Metcalf, who was then a stone-mason, 
for Isaac Shelby, the first Governor of Ken- 
tucky. To those who know the blue-grass land- 
scape, this type of homestead is familiar enough, 
with its solidity of foundation, great thickness 
of walls, enormous, low chimneys, and little 
windows. The owners were the architects and 
builders, and with stern, necessitous industry 
translated their condition into their work, giv- 
ing it an intensely human element. It har- 
monized with need, not with feeling ; was built 
by the virtues, and not by the vanities. With 
no fine balance of proportion, with details few, 
scant, and crude, the entire effect of the archi- 
tecture was not unpleasing, so honest was its 
poverty, so rugged and robust its purpose. It 
was the gravest of all historic commentaries 
written in stone. Varied fate has overtaken 
192 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

these old-time structures. Many have been 
torn down, yielding their well-chosen sites to 
newer, showier houses. Others became in time 
the quarters of the slaves. Others still have 
been hidden away beneath weather-boarding 
— a veneer of commonplace modernism — as 
though whitewashed or painted plank were 
finer than roughhewn graystone. But one is 
glad to discover that in numerous instances 
they are the preferred homes of those who have 
taste for the old in native history, and pride in 
family associations and traditions. On the 
thinned, open landscape nothing stands out 
with a more pathetic air of nakedness than one 
of these stone houses, long since abandoned and 
fallen into ruin. Under the Kentucky sky 
houses crumble and die without seeming to 
grow old, without an aged toning down of col- 
ors, without the tender memorials of mosses 
and lichens, and of the whole race of clinging: 
things. So not until they are quite overthrown 
does Nature reclaim them, or draw once more 
to her bosom the walls and chimneys within 
whose faithful bulwarks, and by whose cavern- 
ous, glowing recesses, our great-grandmothers 
and great-grandfathers danced and made love, 
married, suffered, and fell asleep. 

Neither to the house of logs, therefore, nor 
to that of stone must we look for the earliest 

N I93 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

embodiment of positive taste in domestic archi- 
tecture. This found its first, and, considering 
the exigencies of the period, its most note- 
worthy expression in the homestead of brick. 
No finer specimen survives than that built in 
1796, on a plan furnished by Thomas Jefferson 
to John Brown, who had been his law student, 
remained always his honored friend, and be- 
came one of the founders of the commonwealth. 
It is a rich landmark, this old manor-place on 
the bank of the Kentucky River, in Frankfort. 
The great hall with its pillared archway is wide 
enough for dancing the Virginia reel. The 
suites of high, spacious rooms ; the carefully 
carved woodwork of the window-casings and 
the doors ; the tall, quaint mantel-frames ; the 
deep fireplaces with their shining fire-dogs and 
fenders of brass, brought laboriously enough 
on pack-mules from Philadelphia; the brass 
locks and keys ; the portraits on the walls — all 
these bespeak the early implantation in Ken- 
tucky of a taste for sumptuous life and enter- 
tainment. The house is like a far-descending 
echo of colonial Old Virginia. 

Famous in its day — for it is already beneath 
the sod — and built not of wood, nor of stone, 
nor of brick, but in part of all, was "Chau- 
miere," the home of David Meade during the 
closing years of the last, and the early years of 
194 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

the present, century. The owner, a Virginian 
who had been much in England, brought back 
with him notions of the baronial style of coun- 
try-seat, and in Jessamine County, some ten 
miles from Lexington, built a home that lin- 
gers in the mind like some picture of the imag- 
ination. It was a villa-like place, a cluster of 
rustic cottages, with a great park laid out in 
the style of Old World landscape-gardening. 
There were artificial rivers spanned by bridges, 
and lakes with islands crowned by temples. 
There were terraces and retired alcoves, and 
winding ways cut through flowering thickets. 
A fortune was spent on the grounds ; a retinue 
of servants was employed in nurturing their 
beauty. The dining - room, wainscoted with 
walnut and relieved by deep window - seats, 
was rich with the family service of silver and 
glass ; on the walls of other rooms hung fam- 
ily portraits by Thomas Hudson and Sir Joshua 
Reynolds. Two days in the week were ap- 
pointed for formal receptions. There Jackson 
and Monroe and Taylor were entertained ; 
there Aaron Burr was held for a time under 
arrest; there the old school showed itself in 
buckles and knee-breeches, and rode abroad in 
a yellow chariot with outriders in blue cloth 
and silver buttons! 

Near Lexington may be found a further not- 
i95 



Homesteads of the Blue- Grass 

able example of early architecture in the Todd 
homestead, the oldest house in the region, built 
by the brother of John Todd, who was Govern- 
or of Kentucky Territory, including Illinois. 
It is a strong, spacious brick structure reared 
on a high foundation of stone, with a large, 
square hall and square rooms in suites, con- 
nected by double doors. To the last century 
also belongs the low, irregular pile that be- 
came the Wicklifle, and later the Preston, 
house in Lexington — a striking example of the 
taste then prevalent for plain, or even com- 
monplace, exteriors, if combined with interiors 
that touched the imagination with the sug- 
gestion of something stately and noble and 
courtly. 

There are few types of homes erected in the 
last century. The wonder is not that such 
places exist, but that they should have been 
found in Kentucky at such a time. For society 
had begun as the purest of democracies. Only 
a little while ago the people had been shut up 
within a stockade. Stress of peril and hardship 
had levelled the elements of population to more 
than a democracy : it had knit them together 
as one endangered human brotherhood. Hence 
the sudden, fierce flaring up of sympathy with 
the French Revolution ; hence the deep re- 
echoing war - cry of Jacobin emissaries. But 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

scarcely had the wave of primitive conquest 
flowed over the land, and wealth followed in 
its peaceful wake, before life fell apart into the 
extremes of social caste. The memories of 
former position, the influences of old domestic 
habits were powerful still ; so that, before a 
generation passed, Kentucky society gave 
proof of the continuity of its development 
from Virginia. The region of the James Riv- 
er, so rich in antique homesteads, began to re- 
new itself in the region of the blue-grass. On 
a new and larger canvas began to be painted 
the picture of shaded lawns, wide portals, broad 
staircases, great halls, drawing-rooms, and din- 
ing-rooms, wainscoting, carved wood-work, and 
waxed hard- wood floors. In came a few yellow 
chariots, morocco - lined, and drawn by four 
horses. In came the powder, the wigs, and the 
queues, the ruffled shirts, the knee - breeches, 
the glittering buckles, the high-heeled slippers, 
and the frosty brocades. Over the Alleghanies, 
in slow-moving wagons, came the massive ma- 
hogany furniture, the sunny brasswork, the tall 
silver candlesticks, the nervous - looking, thin 
legged little pianos. In came old manners and 
old speech and old prides : the very Past gath- 
ered together its household gods and made an 
exodus into the Future. 

Without due regard to these essential facts 
197 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

the social system of the State must ever remain 
poorly understood. Hitherto they have been 
but little considered. To the popular imagina- 
tion the most familiar type of the early Kentuc- 
kian is that of the fighter, the hunter, the rude, 
heroic pioneer and his no less heroic wife : peo- 
ple who left all things behind them and set 
their faces westward, prepared to be new creat- 
ures if such they could become. But on the 
dim historic background are the stiff figures of 
another type, people who were equally bent on 
being old-fashioned creatures if such they could 
remain. Thus, during the final years of the 
last century and the first quarter of the present 
one, Kentucky life was richly overlaid with an- 
cestral models. Closely studied, the elements 
of population by the close of this period some- 
what resembled a landed gentry, a robust 
yeomanry, a white tenantry, and a black peas- 
antry. It was only by degrees — by the dying 
out of the fine old types of men and women, 
by longer absence from the old environment 
and closer contact with the new — that society 
lost its inherited and acquired its native char- 
acteristics, or became less Virginian and more 
Kentuckian. Gradually, also, the white ten- 
antry waned and the black peasantry waxed. 
The aristocratic spirit, in becoming more Ken- 
tuckian, unbent somewhat its pride, and the 
198 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

democratic, in becoming more Kentuckian, 
took on a pride of its own; so that when social 
life culminated with the first half - century, 
there had been produced over the Blue-grass 
Region, by the intermingling of the two, that 
widely diffused and peculiar type which may 
be described as an aristocratic democracy, or 
a democratic aristocracy, according to one's 
choosing of a phrase. The beginnings of Ken- 
tucky life represented not simply a slow devel- 
opment from the rudest pioneer conditions, but 
also a direct and immediate implantation of 
the best of long-established social forms. And 
in nowise did the latter embody itself more 
persuasively and lastingly than in the building 
of costly homes. 



Ill 



WITH the opening of the present cen- 
tury, that taste had gone on develop- 
ing. A specimen of early architect- 
ure in the style of the old English mansion 
is to be found in " Locust Grove," a massive 
and enduring structure — not in the Blue-grass 
Region, it is true, but several miles from 
Louisville — built in 1800 for Colonel Croghan, 
brother-in-law of General George Rogers 
Clark ; and still another remains in " Spring 
Hill," in Woodford County, the home of Na- 
thaniel Hart, who had been a boy in the fort 
at Boonesborough. Until recently a further 
representative, though remodelled in later 
times, survived in the Thompson place at 
" Shawnee Springs," in Mercer County. 

Consider briefly the import of such country 
homes as these — "Traveller's Rest,""Chau- 
miere," " Spring Hill," and " Shawnee Springs." 
Built remotely here and there, away from the 
villages or before villages were formed, in a 
200 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

country not yet traversed by limestone high- 
ways or even by lanes, they, and such as they, 
were the beacon-lights, many-windowed and 
kind, of Kentucky entertainment. "Travel- 
ler's Rest" was on the great line of emigra- 
tion from Abingdon through Cumberland Gap. 
Its roof-tree was a boon of universal shelter, 
its very name a perpetual invitation to all the 
weary. Long after the country became thickly 
peopled it, and such places as it, remained the 
rallying-points of social festivity in their sev- 
eral counties, or drew their guests from re- 
moter regions. They brought in the era of 
hospitalities, which by-and-by spread through 
the towns and over the land. If one is ever to 
study this trait as it flowered to perfection in 
Kentucky life, one must look for it in the so- 
ciety of some fifty years ago. Then horses 
were kept in the stables, servants were kept 
in the halls. Guests came uninvited, unan- 
nounced; tables were regularly set for sur- 
prises. " Put a plate," said an old Kentuckian 
of the time with a large family connection — 
"always put a plate for the last one of them 
down to the youngest grandchild." What a 
Kentuckian would have thought of being 
asked to come on the thirteenth of the month 
and to leave on the twentieth, it is difficult to 
imagine. The wedding-presents of brides were 
20 1 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

not only jewels and silver and gold, but a 
round of balls. The people were laughed at 
for their too impetuous civilities. In what- 
ever quarter of the globe they should hap- 
pen to meet for the hour a pleasing stranger, 
they would say in parting, "And when you 
come to Kentucky, be certain to come to my 
house." 

Yet it is needful to discriminate, in speaking 
of Kentucky hospitality. Universally gracious 
towards the stranger, and quick to receive 
him for his individual worth, within the State 
hospitality ran in circles, and the people turned 
a piercing eye on one another's social positions. 
If in no other material aspect did they em- 
body the history of descent so sturdily as in 
the building of homes, in no other trait of 
home life did they reflect this more clearly 
than in family pride. Hardly a little town 
but had its classes that never mingled ; scarce 
a rural neighborhood but insisted on the sanc- 
tity of its salt-cellar and the gloss of its ma- 
hogany. The spirit of caste was somewhat 
Persian in its gravity. Now the Alleghanies 
were its background, and the heroic beginnings 
of Kentucky life supplied its warrant ; now it 
overleaped the Alleghanies, and allied itself to 
the memories of deeds and names in older 
States. But if some professed to look down, 

202 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

none professed to look up. Deference to an 
upper class, if deference existed, was secret 
and resentful, not open and servile. The his- 
tory of great political contests in the State is 
largely the victory and defeat of social types. 
Herein lies a difficulty : you touch any point 
of Kentucky life, and instantly about it cluster 
antagonisms and contradictions. The false is 
true ; the true is false. Society was aristo- 
cratic ; it was democratic ; it was neither ; it 
was both. There was intense family pride, and 
no family pride. The ancestral sentiment was 
weak, and it was strong. To-day you will dis- 
cover the increasing vogue of an Jieraldica 
Kentnckicnsis, and to-day an absolute disre- 
gard of a distinguished past. One tells but 
partial truths. 

Of domestic architecture in a brief and gen- 
eral way something has been said. The pre- 
vailing influence was Virginian, but in Lexing- 
ton and elsewhere may be observed evidences 
of French ideas in the glasswork and designs 
of doors and windows, in rooms grouped around 
a central hall with arching niches and alcoves ; 
for models made their way from New Orleans 
as well as from the East. Out in the country, 
however, at such places as those already men- 
tioned, and in homes nearer town, as at Ash- 
land, a purely English taste was sometimes 
203 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

shown for woodland parks with deer, and, what 
was more peculiarly Kentuckian, elk and buf- 
falo. This taste, once so conspicuous, has 
never become extinct, and certainly the land- 
scape is receptive enough to all such stately 
purposes. At " vSpring Hill " and elsewhere, 
to-day, one may stroll through woods that have 
kept a touch of their native wildness. There 
was the English love of lawns, too, with a low 
matted green turf and wide-spreading shade- 
trees above — elm and maple, locust and poplar 
— the English fondness for a home half hid- 
den with evergreens and creepers and shrub- 
bery, to be approached by a leafy avenue, a 
secluded gate-way, and a gravelled drive ; for 
highways hardly admit to the heart of rural 
life in Kentucky, and way-side homes, to be 
dusted and gazed at by every passer-by, would 
little accord with the spirit of the people. This 
feeling of family seclusion and completeness 
also portrayed itself very tenderly in the cus- 
tom of family graveyards, which were in time 
to be replaced by the democratic cemetery ; and 
no one has ever lingered around those quiet 
spots of aged and drooping cedars, fast-fading 
violets, and perennial myrtle, without being 
made to feel that they grew out of the better 
heart and fostered the finer senses. 

Another evidence of culture among the first 
204 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

generations of Kentuckians is to be seen in the 
private collections of portraits, among which 
one wanders now with a sort of stricken feeling 
that the higher life of Kentucky in this regard 
never went beyond its early promise. Look 
into the meagre history of native art, and you 
will discover that nearly all the best work 
belongs to this early time. It was possible 
then that a Kentuckian could give up law and 
turn to painting. Almost in the wilderness 
Jouett created rich, luminous, startling can- 
vases. Artists came from older States to 
sojourn and to work, and were invited or sum- 
moned from abroad. Painting was taught in 
Lexington in 1800. Well for Jouett, perhaps, 
that he lived when he did ; better for Hart, 
perhaps, that he was not born later ; they 
might have run for Congress. One is prone to 
recur time and again to this period, when the 
ideals of Kentucky life were still wavering or 
unformed, and when there was the greatest 
receptivity to outside impressions. Thinking 
of social life as it was developed, say in and 
around Lexington — of artists coming and 
going, of the statesmen, the lecturers, the law- 
yers, of the dignity and the energy of charac- 
ter, of the intellectual dinners — one is inclined 
to liken the local civilization to a truncated 
cone, to a thing that should have towered to a 
205 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

symmetric apex, but somehow has never risen 
very high above a sturdy base. 

But to speak broadly of home life after it 
became more typically Kentuckian, and after 
architecture began to reflect with greater 
uniformity the character of the people. And 
here one can find material comfort, if not aes- 
thetic delight ; for it is the whole picture of 
human life in the Blue-grass Region that 
pleases. Ride east and west, or north and 
south, along highway or by-way, and the picture 
is the same. One almost asks for relief from 
the monotony of a merely well-to-do existence, 
almost sighs for the extremes of squalor and 
splendor, that nowhere may be seen, and that 
would seem out of place if anywhere con- 
fronted. On, and on, and on you go, seeing 
only the repetition of field and meadow, wood 
and lawn, a winding stream, an artificial pond, 
a sunny vineyard, a blooming orchard, a stone- 
wall, a hedge-row, a tobacco barn, a warehouse, 
a race-track, cattle under the trees, sheep on 
the slopes, swine in the pools, and, half hidden 
by evergreens and shrubbery, the homelike, 
unpretentious houses that crown very simply 
and naturally the entire picture of material 
prosperity. They strike you as built not for 
their own sakes. Few will offer anything that 
lays hold upon the memory, unless it be per- 
206 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

haps a front portico with Doric, Ionic, or Co- 
rinthian columns ; for the typical Kentuckian 
likes to go into his house through a classic 
entrance, no matter what inharmonious things 
may be beyond; and after supper on summer 
evenings nothing fills him with serener comfort 
than to tilt his chair back against a classic sup- 
port, as he smokes a pipe and argues on the 
immortality of a pedigree. 

On the whole, one feels that nature has long 
waited for a more exquisite sense in domestic 
architecture ; that the immeasurable possibili- 
ties of delightful landscape have gone unrecog- 
nized or wasted. Too often there is in form 
and outline no harmony with the spirit of the 
scenery, and there is dissonance of color — color 
which makes the first and strongest impres- 
sion. The realm of taste is prevailingly the 
realm of the want of taste, or of its mere- 
tricious and commonplace violations. Many 
of the houses have a sort of featureless, cold, 
insipid ugliness, and interior and exterior deco- 
rations are apt to go for nothing or for some- 
thing worse. You repeat that nature awaits 
more art, since she made the land so kind to 
beauty ; for no transformation of a rude, un- 
genial landscape is needed. The earth does 
not require to be trimmed and combed and 
perfumed. The airy vistas and delicate slopes 
207 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

are ready-made, the park-like woodlands invite, 
the tender, clinging children of the summer, 
the deep, echoless repose of the whole land, all 
ask that art be laid on every undulation and 
stored in every nook. And there are days with 
such Arcadian colors in air and cloud and sky 
— days with such panoramas of calm, sweet 
pastoral groups and harmonies below, such 
rippling and flashing of waters through green 
underlights and golden interspaces, that the 
shy, coy spirit of beauty seems to be wandering 
half sadly abroad and shunning all the haunts 
of man. 

But little agricultural towns are not art-cen- 
tres. Of itself rural life does not develop 
aesthetic perceptions, and the last, most difficult 
thing to bring into the house is this shy, elu- 
sive spirit of beauty. The Kentucky woman 
has perhaps been corrupted in childhood by 
tasteless surroundings. Her lovable mission, 
the creation of a multitude of small, lovely 
objects, is undertaken feebly and blindly. She 
may not know how to create beauty, may not 
know what beauty is. The temperament of her 
lord, too, is practical : a man of substance and 
stomach, sound at heart, and with an abiding 
sense of his own responsibility and impor- 
tance, honestly insisting on sweet butter and 
new-laid eggs, home-made bread and home- 
208 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

grown mutton, but little revelling in the deli- 
cacies of sensibility, and with no more eye for 
crimson poppies or blue corn-flowers in his 
house than amid his grain. Many a Kentucky 
woman would make her home beautiful if her 
husband would allow her to do it. 

Amid a rural people, also, no class of citizens 
is more influential than the clergy, who go 
about as the shepherds of the right ; and with- 
out doubt in Kentucky, as elsewhere, minis- 
terial ideals have wrought their effects on taste 
in architecture. Perhaps it is well to state 
that this is said broadly, and particularly of 
the past. The Kentucky preachers during 
earlier times were a fiery, zealous, and austere 
set, proclaiming that this world was not a home, 
but wilderness of sin, and exhorting their peo- 
ple to live under the awful shadow of Eter- 
nity. Beauty in every material form was a 
peril, the seductive garment of the devil. Well- 
nigh all that made for aesthetic culture was 
put down, and, like frost on venturesome flow- 
ers, sermons fell on beauty in dress, entertain- 
ment, equipage, houses, church architecture, 
music, the drama, the opera— everything. The 
meek young spirit was led to the creek or 
pond, and perhaps the ice was broken for her 
baptism. If, as she sat in the pew, any vision 
of her chaste loveliness reached the pulpit, 
o 209 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

back came the warning that she would some 
day turn into a withered hag, and must in- 
evitably be " eaten of worms." What wonder 
if the sense of beauty pined or went astray 
and found itself completely avenged in the 
building of such churches? And yet there is 
nothing that even religion more surely de- 
mands than the fostering of the sense of beauty 
within us, and through this also we work tow- 
ards the civilization of the future. 



M 



IV 



ANY rural homes have been built since 
the war, but the old type of country 
life has vanished. On the whole, there 
has been a strong movement of population 
towards the towns, rapidly augmenting their 
size. Elements of showiness and freshness have 
been added to their once unobtrusive archi- 
tecture. And, in particular, that art move- 
ment and sudden quickening of the love of 
beauty which swept over this country a few 
years since has had its influence here. But for 
the most part the newer homes are like the 
newer homes in other American cities, and the 
style of interior appointment and decoration 
has few native characteristics. As a rule the 
people love the country life less than of yore, 
since an altered social system has deprived it 
of much leisure, and has added hardships. The 
Kentuckian does not regard it as part of his 
mission in life to feed fodder to stock ; and 
servants are hard to get, the colored ladies and 
211 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

gentlemen having developed a taste for urban 
society. 

What is to be the future of the Blue-grass 
Region? When population becomes denser 
and the pressure is felt in every neighborhood, 
who will possess it ? One seems to see in cer- 
tain tendencies of American life the probable 
answer to this question. The small farmer 
will be bought out, and will disappear. Es- 
tates will grow fewer and larger. The whole 
land will pass into the hands of the rich, being 
too precious for the poor to own. Already 
here and there one notes the disposition to 
create vast domains by the slow swallowing 
up of contiguous small ones. Consider in this 
connection the taste already shown by the rich 
American in certain parts of the United States 
to found a country-place in the style of an 
English lord. Consider, too, that the landscape 
is much like the loveliest of rural England; 
that the trees, the grass, the sculpture of the 
scenery are such as make the perfect beauty 
of a park; that the fox, the bob -white, the 
thoroughbred, and the deer are indigenous. 
Apparently, therefore, one can foresee the dis- 
tant time when this will become the region of 
splendid homes and estates that will nourish 
a taste for out-door sports and offer an escape 
from the too-wearying cities. On the other 
212 



Homesteads of the Blue-Grass 

hand, a powerful and ever-growing interest is 
that of the horse, racer or trotter. He brings 
into the State his increasing capital, his types 
of men. Year after year he buys farms, and 
lays out tracks, and builds stables, and edits 
journals, and turns agriculture into grazing. 
In time the Blue -grass Region may become 
the Yorkshire of America. 

But let the future have its own. The coun- 
try will become theirs who deserve it, whether 
they build palaces or barns. Only one hopes 
that when the old homesteads have been torn 
down or have fallen into ruins, the tradition 
may still run that they, too, had their day and 
deserved their page of history. 



THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP 
ON HORSEBACK 



1 



FRESH fields lay before us that summer of 
1 885. We had left the rich, rolling plains 
of the Blue-grass Region in central Ken- 
tucky and set our faces towards the great Ap- 
palachian uplift on the south-eastern border of 
the State. There Cumberland Gap, that high- 
swung gateway through the mountain, abides 
as a landmark of what Nature can do when she 
wishes to give an opportunity to the human 
race in its migrations and discoveries, without 
surrendering control of its liberty and its fate. 
It can never be too clearly understood by those 
who are wont to speak of "the Kentuckians" 
that this State has within its boundaries two 
entirely distinct elements of population — ele- 
ments distinct in England before they came 
hither, distinct during more than a century of 
residence here, and distinct now in all that goes 
to constitute a separate community — occupa- 
tions, manners and customs, dress, views of life, 
civilization. It is but a short distance from the 
217 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

blue-grass country to the eastern mountains ; 
but in traversing it you detach yourself from 
all that you have ever experienced, and take up 
the history of English-speaking men and wom- 
en at the point it had reached a hundred or a 
hundred and fifty years ago. 

Leaving Lexington, then, which is in the 
midst of the blue-grass plateau, we were come 
to Burnside, where begin the navigable waters 
of the Cumberland River, and the foot-hills of 
the Cumberland Mountains. 

Burnside is not merely a station, but a moun- 
tain watering-place. The water is mostly in 
the bed of the river. We had come hither to get 
horses and saddle-bags, but to no purpose. The 
hotel was a sort of transition point between the 
civilization we had left and the primitive society 
we were to enter. On the veranda were some 
distinctly modern and conventional red chairs ; 
but a green and yellow gourd-vine, carefully 
trained so as to shut out the landscape, was a 
genuine bit of local color. Under the fine 
beeches in the yard was swung a hammock, but 
it was made of boards braced between ropes, 
and was covered with a weather-stained piece 
of tarpaulin. There were electric bells in the 
house that did not electrify ; and near the front 
entrance three barrels of Irish potatoes, with 
the tops off, spoke for themselves in the ab- 





OLD FERRY A I' POINT r.DRNSIDE 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

sence of the bill of fare. After supper, the cook, 
a tall, blue-eyed, white fellow, walked into my 
room without explanation, and carried away his 
guitar, showing that he had been wont to set his 
sighs to music in that quarter of the premises. 
The moon hung in that part of the heavens, and 
no doubt ogled him into many a midnight fren- 
zy. Sitting under a beech-tree in the morning, I 
had watched a child from some city, dressed 
in white and wearing a blue ribbon around her 
goldenish hair, amuse herself by rolling old bar- 
rels (potato barrels probably, and she may have 
had a motive) down the hill-side and seeing 
them dashed to pieces on the railway track be- 
low. By-and-by some of the staves of one fell 
in, the child tumbled in also, and they all rolled 
over together. Upon the whole, it was an odd 
overlapping of two worlds. When the railway 
was first opened through this region a young- 
man established a fruit store at one of the sta- 
tions, and as part of his stock laid in a bunch 
of bananas. One day a mountaineer entered. 
Arrangements generally struck him with sur- 
prise, but everything else was soon forgotten 
in an adhesive contemplation of that mighty 
aggregation of fruit. Finally he turned away 
with this comment : " Damn me if them ain't 
the damnedest beans /ever seen !" 

The scenery around Burnside is beautiful, 
219 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

and the climate bracing. In the valleys was 
formerly a fine growth of walnut, but the prin- 
cipal timbers now are oak, ash, and sycamore, 
with yellow pine. I heard of a wonderful wal- 
nut tree formerly standing, by hiring vehicles 
to go and see which the owner of a livery-stable 
made three hundred and fifty dollars. Six hun- 
dred were offered for it on the spot. The hills 
are filled with the mountain limestone — that 
Kentucky oolite of which the new Cotton Ex- 
change in New York is built. Here was Burn- 
side's depot of supplies during the war, and 
here passed the great road — made in part a cor- 
duroy road at his order — from Somerset, Ken- 
tucky, to Jacksborough, over which countless 
stores were taken from central Kentucky and 
regions farther north into Tennessee. Supplies 
were brought up the river in small steamboats 
or overland in wagons, and when the road grew 
impassable, pack-mules were used. Sad sights 
there were in those sad days : the carcasses of 
animals at short intervals from here to Knox- 
ville, and now and then a mule sunk up to his 
body in mire, and abandoned, with his pack on, 
to die. Here were batteries planted and rifle- 
pits dug, the vestiges of which yet remain ; but 
where the forest timbers were then cut down a 
vigorous new growth has long been reclaiming 
the earth to native wildness, and altogether the 
220 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

aspect of the place is peaceful and serene. Doves 
were flying in and out of the corn-fields on the 
hill-sides ; there were green stretches in the val- 
leys where cattle were grazing ; and these, to- 
gether with a single limestone road that wound 
upward over a distant ridge, recalled the richer 
scenes of the blue-grass lands. 

Assured that we should find horses and sad- 
dle-bags at Cumberland Falls, we left Burnside 
in the afternoon, and were soon set down at a 
station some fifteen miles farther along, where 
a hack conveyed us to another of those moun- 
tain watering-places that are being opened up 
in various parts of eastern Kentucky for the 
enjoyment of a people that has never cared to 
frequent in large numbers the Atlantic sea- 
board. 

As we drove on, the darkness was falling, 
and the scenery along the road grew wilder 
and grander. A terrific storm had swept over 
these heights, and the great trees lay uptorn 
and prostrate in every direction, or reeled and 
fell against each other like drunken giants — a 
scene of fearful elemental violence. On the 
summits one sees the tan - bark oak ; lower 
down, the white oak ; and lower yet, fine speci- 
mens of yellow poplar ; while from the val- 
leys to the crests is a dense and varied under- 
growth, save where the ground has been burned 

221 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

over, year after year, to kill it out and improve 
the grazing. Twenty miles to the south-east 
we had seen through the pale -tinted air the 
waving line of Jellico Mountains in Tennessee. 
Away to the north lay the Beaver Creek and 
the lower Cumberland, while in front of us rose 
the craggy, scowling face of Anvil Rock, com- 
manding a view of Kentucky, Tennessee, and 
Virginia. The utter silence and heart-oppress- 
ing repose of primeval nature was around us. 
The stark white and gray trunks of the im- 
memorial forest dead linked us to an inviolable 
past. The air seemed to blow upon us from 
over regions illimitable and unexplored, and to 
be fraught with unutterable suggestions. The 
full - moon swung itself aloft over the sharp 
touchings of the green with spectral pallor ; 
and the evening - star stood lustrous on the 
western horizon in depths of blue as cold as a 
sky of Landseer, except where brushed by 
tremulous shadows of rose on the verge of the 
sunlit world. A bat wheeled upward in fan- 
tastic curves out of his undiscovered glade. 
And the soft tinkle of a single cow-bell far be- 
low marked the invisible spot of some lonely 
human habitation. By-and-by we lost sight of 
the heavens altogether, so dense and interlaced 
the forest. The descent of the hack appeared 
to be into a steep abyss of gloom ; then all at 

222 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

once we broke from the edge of the woods into 
a flood of moonlight; at our feet were the 
whirling, foaming rapids of the river ; in our 
ears was the roar of the cataract, where the 
bow-crowned mist rose and floated upward and 
away in long trailing shapes of ethereal light- 
ness. 

The Cumberland River throws itself over 
the rocks here with a fall of seventy feet, or a 
perpendicular descent of sixty-two, making a 
mimic but beautiful Niagara. Just below, at 
Eagle Falls, it drops over its precipice in a 
lawny cascade. The roar of the cataract, un- 
der favorable conditions, may be heard up and 
down stream a distance of ten or twelve miles. 
You will not find in mountainous Kentucky a 
more picturesque spot. 

While here, we had occasion to extend our 
acquaintance with native types. Two young 
men came to the hotel, bringing a bag of small, 
hard peaches to sell. Slim, slab-sided, stomach- 
less, and serene, mild, and melancholy, they 
might have been lotos-eaters, only the sugges- 
tion of poetry was wanting. Their unutter- 
able content came not from the lotos, but 
, from their digestion. If they could sell their 
peaches, they would be happy ; if not, they 
would be happy. What they could not sell, 
they could as well eat ; and since no bargain 
223 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

was made on this occasion, they took chairs on 
the hotel veranda, opened the bag, and fell to. 
I talked with the Benjamin of his tribe : 

" Is that a good 'coon dog ?" 

" A mighty good 'coon dog. I hain't never 
seed him whipped by a varmint yit." 

" Are there many 'coons in this country ?" 

" Several 'coons." 

" Is this a good year for 'coons ?" 

" A mighty good year for 'coons. The woods 
is full o' varmints." 

" Do 'coons eat corn ?" 

'"Coons is bad as hogs on corn, when they 
git tuk to it." 

u Are there many wild turkeys in this coun- 
try ?" 

" Several wild turkeys." 

" Have you ever caught many 'coons ?" 

" I've cotched high as five 'coons out o' one 
tree." 

" Are there many foxes in this country ?" 

" Several foxes." 

" What's the best way to cook a 'coon ?" 

"Ketch him and parbile him, and then put 
him in cold water and soak him, and then put 
him in and bake him." 

"Are there many hounds in this country?" 

"Several hounds." 

Here, among other discoveries, was a lin- 
224 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

guistic one — the use of "several" in the sense 
of a great many, probably an innumerable 
multitude, as in the case of the 'coons. 

They hung around the hotel for hours, as 
beings utterly exempt from all the obligations 
and other phenomena of time. 

" Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of 
things ?" 

The guide bespoken the evening before had 
made arrangements for our ride of some eigh- 
teen miles — was it not forty? — to Williamsburg, 
and in the afternoon made his appearance with 
three horses. Of these one was a mule, with 
a strong leaning towards his father's family. 
Of the three saddles one was a side-saddle, and 
another was an army saddle with refugee stir- 
rups. The three beasts wore among them some 
seven shoes. My own mincing jade had none. 
Her name must have been Helen of Troy 
(all horses are named in Kentucky), so long 
ago had her great beauty disappeared. She 
partook with me of the terror which her own 
movements inspired ; and if there ever was a 
well-defined case in which the man should have 
carried the beast, this was the one. While on 
her back I occasionally apologized for the in- 
justice of riding her by handing her some sour 
p 225 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

apples, the like of which she appeared never to 
have tasted before, just as it was told me she 
had never known the luxury of wearing shoes. 
It is often true that the owner of a horse in 
this region is too poor or too mean to have it 
shod. 

Our route from Cumberland Falls lay- 
through what is called " Little Texas," in 
Whitley County — a wilderness some twenty 
miles square. I say route, because there was 
not always a road ; but for the guide, there 
would not always have been a direction. Rough 
as the country appears to one riding through 
it on horseback, it is truly called " flat woods 
country " ; and viewed from Jellico Mountains, 
whence the local elevations are of no account, 
it looks like one vast sweep of sloping, densely 
wooded land. Here one may see noble speci- 
mens of yellow poplar in the deeper soil at the 
head of the ravines ; pin-oak, and gum and 
willow, and the rarely beautiful wild-cucumber. 
Along the streams in the lowlands blooms the 
wild calacanthus, filling the air with fragrance, 
and here in season the wild camellia throws 
open its white and purple splendors. 

It was not until we had passed out of " Lit- 
tle Texas" and reached Williamsburg, had gone 
thence to Barbourville, the county-seat of the 
adjoining county of Knox, and thence again 
226 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

into Bell County, that we stopped at an old 
way-side inn on the Wilderness road from Ken- 
tucky through Cumberland Gap. Around us 
were the mountains — around us the mountain- 
eers whom we wished to study. 



II 



STRAIGHT, slim, angular, white bodies ; 
average or even unusual stature, without 
great muscular robustness ; features reg- 
ular and colorless ; unanimated but intelligent ; 
in the men sometimes fierce ; in the women 
often sad ; among the latter occasional beauty 
of a pure Greek type ; a manner shy and defer- 
ential, but kind and fearless ; eyes with a slow, 
long look of mild inquiry, or of general listless- 
ness, or of unconscious and unaccountable 
melancholy ; the key of life a low minor strain, 
losing itself in reverie ; voices monotonous in 
intonation ; movements uninformed by ner- 
vousness — these are characteristics of the Ken- 
tucky mountaineers. Living to-day as their 
forefathers lived a hundred years ago ; hearing 
little of the world, caring nothing for it ; re- 
sponding feebly to the influences of civilization 
near the highways of travel in and around the 
towns, and latterly along the lines of railway 
communication ; but sure to live here, if unin- 
228 




.NATIVE TYPES 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

vaded and unaroused, in the same condition 
for a hundred years to come ; lacking the spirit 
of development from within ; devoid of sympa- 
thy with that boundless and ungovernable 
activity which is carrying the Saxon race in 
America from one state to another, whether 
better or worse. The origin of these people, 
the relation they sustain to the different pop- 
ulation of the central Kentucky region — in 
fine, an account of them from the date of their 
settling in these mountains to the present 
time, when, as it seems, they are on the point 
of losing their isolation, and with it their dis- 
tinctiveness — would imprison phases of life and 
character valuable alike to the special history 
of this country and to the general history of 
the human mind. 

The land in these mountains is all claimed, 
but it is probably not all covered by actual 
patent. As evidence, a company has been 
formed to speculate in lands not secured by 
title. The old careless way of marking off 
boundaries by going from tree to tree, by 
partly surveying and partly guessing, explains 
the present uncertainty. Many own land by 
right of occupancy, there being no other claim. 
The great body of the people live on and cul- 
tivate little patches which they either own, or 
hold free, or pay rent for with a third of the 
229 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

crop. These not unfrequently get together 
and trade farms as they would horses, no deed 
being executed. There is among them a mobile 
element — squatters — who make a hill-side clear- 
ing and live on it as long as it remains produc- 
tive ; then they move elsewhere. This accounts 
for the presence throughout the country of 
abandoned cabins, around which a new forest 
growth is springing up. Leaving out of con- 
sideration the few instances of substantial pros- 
perity, the most of the people are abjectly poor, 
and they appear to have no sense of accumula- 
tion. The main crops raised are corn and 
potatoes. In the scant gardens will be seen 
patches of cotton, sorghum, and tobacco ; flax 
also, though less than formerly. Many make 
insufficient preparation for winter, laying up 
no meat, but buying a piece of bacon now and 
then, and paying for it with work. In some 
regions the great problem of life is to raise 
two dollars and a half during the year for 
county taxes. Being pauper counties, they 
are exempt from State taxation. Jury fees 
are highly esteemed and much sought after. 
The manufacture of illicit mountain whiskey 
— " moonshine " — was formerly, as it is now, a 
considerable source of revenue; and a desper- 
ate sub-source of revenue from the same busi- 
ness has been the betrayal of its hidden places. 
230 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

There is nothing harder or more dangerous to 
find now in the mountains than a still. 

Formerly digging "sang," as they call gin- 
seng, was a general occupation. For this 
China was a great market. It has nearly all 
been dug out except in the wildest parts of the 
country, where entire families may still be 
seen "out sangin'." They took it into the 
towns in bags, selling it at a dollar and ten 
cents — perhaps a dollar and a half — a pound. 
This was mainly the labor of the women and 
the children, who went to work barefooted, 
amid briers and chestnut burs, copperheads 
and rattlesnakes. Indeed, the women prefer 
to go barefooted, finding shoes a trouble and 
constraint. It was a sad day for the people 
when the "sang" grew scarce. A few years 
ago one of the counties was nearly depopu- 
lated in consequence of a great exodus into 
Arkansas, whence had come the news that 
"sang" was plentiful. Not long since, during 
a season of scarcity in corn, a local store-keeper 
told the people of a county to go out and 
gather all the mandrake or " May-apple " root 
they could find. At first only the women and 
children went to work, the men holding back 
with ridicule. By-and-by they also took part, 
and that year some fifteen tons were gathered, 
at three cents a pound, and the whole country 
231 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

thus got its seed-corn. Wild ginger was an- 
other root formerly much dug ; also to less ex- 
tent " golden-seal " and " bloodroot." The sale 
of feathers from a few precarious geese helps 
to eke out subsistence. Their methods of 
agriculture — if methods they may be styled — 
are the most primitive. Ploughing is com- 
monly done with a "bull-tongue," an imple- 
ment hardly more than a sharpened stick with 
a metal rim ; this is often drawn by an ox, or 
a half-yoke. But one may see women plough- 
ing with two oxen. Traces are made of hickory 
or papaw, as also are bed-cords. Ropes are 
made of lynn bark. In some counties there is 
not so much as a fanning-mill, grain being 
winnowed by pouring it from basket to basket, 
after having been threshed with a flail, which 
is a hickory withe some seven feet long. Their 
threshing-floor is a clean place on the ground, 
and they take up grain, gravel, and dirt together, 
not knowing, or not caring for, the use of a sieve. 
The grain is ground at their homes in a hand 
tub-mill, or one made by setting the nether 
millstone in a bee-gum, or by cutting a hole in 
a puncheon-log and sinking the stone into it. 
There are, however, other kinds of mills : the 
primitive little water-mill, which may be con- 
sidered almost characteristic of this region ; in 
a few places improved water-mills, and small 

2"22 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

steam-mills. It is the country of mills, farm- 
houses being furnished with one as with coffee- 
pot or spinning-wheel. A simpler way of 
preparing corn for bread than by even the 
hand-mill is used in the late summer and early 
autumn, while the grain is too hard for eating 
as roasting-ears, and too soft to be ground in 
a mill. On a board is tacked a piece of tin 
through which holes have been punched from 
the under side, and over this tin the ears are 
rubbed, producing a coarse meal, of which 
"gritted bread" is made. Much pleasure and 
much health they get from their "gritted 
bread," which is sweet and wholesome for a 
hungry man. 

Where civilization has touched on the high- 
ways and the few improved mills have been 
erected, one may see women going to mill 
with their scant sacks of grain, riding on a 
jack, a jennet, or a bridled ox. But this is not 
so bad as in North Carolina, where, Europa- 
like, they ride on bulls. 

Aside from such occupations, the men have 
nothing to do — a little work in the spring, and 
nine months' rest. They love to meet at the 
country groceries and cross-roads, to shoot 
matches for beef, turkeys, or liquor, and to 
gamble. There is with them a sort of annual 
succession of amusements. In its season they 
233 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

have the rage for pitching horse-shoes, the 
richer ones using dollar pieces. In conse- 
quence of their abundant leisure, the loneli- 
ness of the mountains, and their bravery and 
vigor, quarrels are frequent and feuds deadly. 
Personal enmities soon serve to array entire 
families in an attitude of implacable hostility ; 
and in the course of time relatives and friends 
take sides, and a war of extermination ensues. 
The special origins of these feuds are various : 
blood heated and temper lost under the influ- 
ence of " moonshine "; reporting the places and 
manufacturers of this ; local politics ; the survi- 
val of resentments engendered during the Civil 
War. These, together with all causes that lie 
in the passions of the human heart and spring 
from the constitution of all human society, often 
make the remote and insulated life of these 
people turbulent, reckless, and distressing. 

But while thus bitter and cruel towards each 
other, they present to strangers the aspect of 
a polite, kind, unoffending, and most hospita- 
ble race. They will divide with you shelter 
and warmth and food, however scant, and will 
put themselves to trouble for your convenience 
with an unreckoning, earnest friendliness and 
good -nature that is touching to the last de- 
gree. No sham, no pretence ; a true friend, or 
an open enemj^. Of late they have had much 
234 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

occasion to regard new-comers with distrust, 
which, once aroused, is difficult to dispel ; and 
now they will wish to know you and your busi- 
ness before treating you with that warmth 
which they are only too glad to show. 

The women do most of the work. From the 
few sheep, running wild, which the farm may 
own, they take the wool, which is carded, reeled, 
spun, and woven into fabrics by their own hands 
and on their rude implements. One or two 
spinning-wheels will be found in every house. 
Cotton from their little patches they clean by 
using a primitive hand cotton-gin. Flax, much 
spun formerly, is now less used. It is surpris- 
ing to see from what appliances they will bring 
forth exquisite fabrics : garments for personal 
wear, bedclothes, and the like. When they can 
afford it they make carpets. 

They have, as a rule, luxuriant hair. In 
some counties one is struck by the purity of 
the Saxon type, and their faces in early life 
are often handsome. But one hears that in 
certain localities they are prone to lose their 
teeth, and that after the age of thirty-five it 
is a rare thing to see a woman whose teeth are 
not partly or wholly wanting. The reason is 
not apparent. They appear passionately fond 
of dress, and array themselves in gay colors 
and in jewelry (pinchbeck), if their worldly es- 
235 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

tate justifies the extravagance. Oftener, if 
young, they have a modest, shy air, as if con- 
scious that their garb is not decorous. Whether 
married or unmarried, they show much natural 
diffidence. It is told that in remoter districts 
of the mountains they are not allowed to sit at 
the table with the male members of the house- 
hold, but serve them as in ancient societies. 
Commonly, in going to church, the men ride 
and carry the children, while the women walk. 
Dancing in some regions is hardly known, but 
in others is a favorite amusement, and in its 
movements men and women show grace. The 
mountain preachers oppose it as a sin. 

Marriages take place early. They are a fec- 
und race. I asked them time and again to fix 
upon the average number of children to a fam- 
ily, and they gave as the result seven. In case 
of parental opposition to wedlock, the lovers 
run off. There is among the people a low 
standard of morality in their domestic rela- 
tions, the delicate privacies of home life hav- 
ing little appreciation where so many persons, 
without regard to age or sex, are crowded to- 
gether within very limited quarters. 

The dwellings — often mere cabins with a 

single room — are built of rough -hewn logs, 

chinked or daubed, though not always. Often 

there is a puncheon floor and no chamber roof. 

236 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

One of these mountaineers, called into court to 
testify as to the household goods of a defend- 
ant neighbor, gave in as the inventory, a string 
of pumpkins, a skillet without a handle, and 
" a wild Bill." " A wild Bill " is a bed made by 
boring auger - holes into a log, driving sticks 
into these, and overlaying them with hickory 
bark and sedge-grass — a favorite couch. The 
low chimneys, made usually of laths daubed, 
are so low that the saying, inelegant though 
true, is current, that you may sit by the fire 
inside and spit out over the top. The cracks 
in the walls are often large enough to give in- 
gress and egress to child or dog. Even cellars 
are little known, potatoes sometimes being kept 
during winter in a hole dug under the hearth- 
stone. More frequently a trap - door is made 
through the plank flooring in the middle of the 
room, and in a hole beneath are put potatoes, 
and, in case of wealth, jellies and preserves. 
Despite the wretchedness of their habitations 
and the rigors of mountain climate, they do not 
suffer with cold, and one may see them out in 
snow knee-deep clad in low brogans, and nothing 
heavier than a jeans coat and hunting shirt. 

The customary beverage is coffee, bitter and 

black, not having been roasted but burned. 

All drink it, from the youngest up. Another 

beverage is "mountain tea/' which is made 

237 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

from the sweet-scented golden-rod and from 
winter-green — the New England checkerberry. 
These decoctions they mollify with home-made 
sorghum molasses, which they call " long sweet- 
ening," or with sugar, which by contrast is 
known as "short sweetening." 

Of home government there is little or none, 
boys especially setting aside at will parental 
authority ; but a sort of traditional sense of 
duty and decorum restrains them by its silent 
power, and moulds them into respect. Chil- 
dren while quite young are often plump to 
roundness, but soon grow thin and white and 
meagre like the parents. There is little desire 
for knowledge or education. The mountain 
schools have sometimes less than half a dozen 
pupils during the few months they are in ses- 
sion. A gentleman who wanted a coal bank 
opened, engaged for the work a man passing 
along the road. Some days later he learned 
that his workman was a school-teacher, who, 
in consideration of the seventy-five cents a day, 
had dismissed his academy. 

Many, allured by rumors from the West, 
have migrated thither, but nearly all come 
back, from love of the mountains, from indis- 
position to cope with the rush and vigor and 
enterprise of frontier life. Theirs, they say, is 
a good lazy man's home. 
238 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

Their customs respecting the dead are inter- 
esting. When a husband dies his funeral ser- 
mon is not preached, but the death of the wife 
is awaited, and vice versa. Then a preacher 
is sent for, friend and neighbor called in, and 
the respect is paid both together. Often 
two or three preachers are summoned, and 
each delivers a sermon. More peculiar is the 
custom of having the services for one person 
repeated ; so that the dead get their funerals 
preached several times, months and years after 
their burial. I heard of the pitiful story of 
two sisters who had their mother's funeral 
preached once every summer as long as they 
lived. You may engage the women in mourn- 
ful conversation respecting the dead, but hard- 
ly the men. In strange contrast with this re- 
gard for ceremonial observances is their neglect 
of the graves of their beloved, which they do not 
seem at all to visit when once closed, or to dec- 
orate with those symbols of affection which are 
the common indications of bereavement. 

Nothing that I have ever seen is so lonely, 
so touching in its neglect and wild, irreparable 
solitude, as one of these mountain graveyards. 
On some knoll under a clump of trees, or along 
some hill-side where dense oak-trees make a 
mid-day gloom, you walk amid the unknown, 
undistinguishable dead. Which was father 
239 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

and which mother, where are lover and strick- 
en sweetheart, whether this is the dust of 
laughing babe or crooning grandam, you will 
never know : no foot - stones, no head - stones ; 
sometimes a few rough rails laid around, as 
you would make a little pen for swine. In 
places, however, one sees a picket - fence put 
up, or a sort of shed built over. 

Traditions and folk - lore among them are 
evanescent, and vary widely in different locali- 
ties. It appears that in part they are sprung 
from the early hunters who came into the 
mountains when game was abundant, sport 
unfailing, living cheap. Among them now are 
still -hunters, who know the haunts of bear 
and deer, needing no dogs. They even now 
prefer wild meat — even " 'possum " and " 'coon" 
and ground-hog — to any other. In Bell County 
I spent the day in the house of a woman eighty 
years old, who was a lingering representative 
of a nearly extinct type. She had never been 
out of the neighborhood of her birth, knew the 
mountains like a garden, had whipped men in 
single-handed encounter, brought down many 
a deer and wild turkey with her own rifle, and 
now, infirm, had but to sit in her cabin door 
and send her trained dogs into the depths of 
the forests to discover the wished -for game. 
A fiercer woman I never looked on. 
240 



Ill 



OUR course now lay direct towards Cum- 
berland Gap, some twenty miles south- 
ward. Our road ran along the bank of 
the Cumberland River to the ford, the imme- 
morial crossing-place of early travel — and a 
beautiful spot — thence to Pineville, situated in 
that narrow opening in Pine Mountain where 
the river cuts it, and thence through the valley 
of Yellow Creek to the wonderful pass. The 
scenery in this region is one succession of dense- 
ly wooded mountains, blue-tinted air, small cul- 
tivated tracts in the fertile valleys, and lovely 
watercourses. 

Along the first part of our route the river 
slips crystal-clear over its rocky bed, and be- 
neath the lone green pendent branches of the 
trees that crowd the banks. At the famous 
ford it was only two or three feet deep at the 
time of our crossing. This is a historic point. 
Here was one of the oldest settlements in the 
country ; here the Federal army destroyed the 
Q 241 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

houses and fences during the Civil War ; and 
here Zollikoffer came to protect the Kentucky 
gate that opens into East Tennessee. At Pine- 
ville, just beyond, we did not remain long. For 
some reason not clearly understood by travel- 
lers, a dead-line has been drawn through the 
midst of the town, and not knowing on which 
side we were entitled to stand, we hastened 
on to a place where we might occupy neutral 
ground. 

The situation is strikingly picturesque : the 
mountain looks as if cleft sheer and fallen apart, 
the peaks on each side rising almost perpendicu- 
larly, with massive overhanging crests wooded 
to the summits, but showing gray rifts of the 
inexhaustible limestone. The river when low- 
est is here at an elevation of nine hundred and 
sixty feet, and the peaks leap to the height of 
twenty-two hundred. Here in the future will 
most probably pass a railroad, and be a popu- 
lous town, for here is the only opening through 
Pine Mountain from " the brakes " of Sandy to 
the Tennessee line, and tributary to the water- 
courses that centre here are some five hundred 
thousand acres of timber land. 

The ride from Pineville to the Gap, fourteen 

miles southward, is most beautiful. Yellow 

Creek becomes in local pronunciation " Yaller 

Crick." One cannot be long in eastern Ken- 

242 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

tucky without being struck by the number and 
character of the names given to the water- 
courses, which were the natural avenues of 
migratory travel. Few of the mountains have 
names. What a history is shut up in these 
names! Cutshin Creek, where some pioneer, 
they say, damaged those useful members ; but 
more probably where grows a low greenbrier 
which cuts the shins and riddles the pantaloons. 
These pioneers had humor. They named one 
creek " Troublesome," for reasons apparent to 
him who goes there ; another, " No Worse Creek," 
on equally good grounds ; another, " Defeated 
Creek"; and a great many, "Lost Creek." In 
one part of the country it is possible for one to 
enter " Hell fur Sartain," and get out at "King- 
dom Come." Near by are "Upper Devil" and 
"Lower Devil." One day we went to a moun- 
tain meeting which was held in " a school-house 
and church-house " on " Stinking Creek." One 
might suppose they would have worshipped in 
a more fragrant locality ; but the stream is very 
beautiful, and not malodorous. It received its 
name from its former canebrakes and deer licks, 
which made game abundant. Great numbers 
were killed for choice bits of venison and hides. 
Then there are " Ten-mile Creek " and " Six- 
teen-mile Creek," meaning to clinch the dis- 
tance by name; and what is philologically in- 
243 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

teresting, one finds numerous "Trace Forks," 
originally "Trail Forks." 

Bell County and the Yellow Creek Valley 
serve to illustrate the incalculable mineral and 
timber resources of eastern Kentucky. Our 
road at times cut through forests of magnifi- 
cent timbers — oak (black and white), walnut 
(black and white), poplar, maple, and chestnut, 
beech, lynn. gum, dogwood, and elm. Here are 
some of the finest coal-fields in the world, the 
one on Clear Creek being fourteen feet thick. 
Here are pure cannel-coals and coking-coals. 
At no other point in the Mississippi Valley are 
iron ores suitable for steel-making purposes so 
close to fuel so cheap. With an eastern coal- 
field of 10,000 square miles, with an area equally 
large covered with a virgin growth of the finest 
economic timbers, with watercourses feasible 
and convenient, it cannot be long before eastern 
Kentucky will be opened up to great industries. 
Enterprise has already turned hither, and the 
distinctiveness of the mountaineer race already 
begins to disappear. The two futures before 
them are, to be swept out of these mountains 
by the in-rushing spirit of contending indus- 
tries, or to be aroused, civilized, and devel- 
oped. 

Long before you come in sight of the great 
Gap, the idea of it dominates the mind. While 
244 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

yet some miles away, it looms up, 1675 feet in 
elevation, some half a mile across from crest to 
crest, the pinnacle on the left towering to the 
height of 2500 feet. 

It was late in the afternoon when our tired 
horses began the long, winding, rocky climb 
from the valley to the brow of the pass. As we 
stood in the passway, amid the deepening shad- 
ows of the twilight and the solemn repose of 
the mighty landscape, the Gap seemed to be 
crowded with two invisible and countless page- 
ants of human life, the one passing in, the other 
passing out ; and the air grew thick with un- 
heard utterances — primeval sounds, undistin- 
guishable and strange, of creatures nameless 
and never seen by man ; the wild rush and 
whoop of retreating and pursuing tribes ; the 
slow steps of watchful pioneers; the wail of 
dying children and the songs of homeless wom- 
en ; the muffled tread of routed and broken 
armies — all the sounds of surprise and delight, 
victory and defeat, hunger and pain, and weari- 
ness and despair, that the human heart can 
utter. Here passed the first of the white race 
who led the way into the valley of the Cum- 
berland ; here passed that small band of fear- 
less men who gave the Gap its name; here 
passed the "Long Hunters"; here rushed the 
armies of the Civil War ; here has passed the 
245 



Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback 

wave of westerly emigration, whose force has 
spent itself only on the Pacific slopes; and 
here in the long future must flow backward 
and forward the wealth of the North and the 
South. 



MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE 
CUMBERLAND 



THE writer has been publishing during the 
last few years a series of articles on 
Kentucky. With this article the series 
will be brought to a close. Hitherto he has 
written of nature in the Blue-grass Region and 
of certain aspects of life ; but as he comes to 
take leave of his theme, he finds his attention 
fixed upon that great mountain wall which lies 
along the southeastern edge of the State. At 
various points of this wall are now beginning 
to be enacted new scenes in the history of Ken- 
tucky ; and what during a hundred years has 
been an inaccessible background, is becoming 
the fore-front of a civilization which will not 
only change the life of the State within, but ad- 
vance it to a commanding position in national 
economic affairs. 

But it should not be lost sight of that in writ- 
ing this article, as in writing all the others, it 
is with the human problem in Kentucky that 
he is solely concerned. He will seem to be deal- 
249 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

ing with commercial activities for their own 
sake. He will write of coals and ores and tim- 
bers, of ovens and tunnels and mines ; but if the 
reader will bear with him to the end, he will 
learn that these are dealt with only for the sake 
of looking beyond them at the results which 
they bring on : town-making in various stages, 
the massing and distributing of wealth, the 
movements of population, the dislodgment of 
isolated customs — on the whole, results that lie 
in the domain of the human problem in its 
deepest phases. 

Consider for a moment, then, what this great 
wall is, and what influence it has had over the 
history of Kentucky and upon the institutions 
and characteristics of its people. 

You may begin at the western frontier of 
Kentucky on the Mississippi River, about five 
hundred miles away, and travel steadily east- 
ward across the billowy plateau of the State, 
going up and up all the time until you come to 
its base, and above its base it rises to the height 
of some three thousand feet. For miles before 
you reach it you discover that it is defended by 
a zone of almost inaccessible hills with steep 
slopes, forests difficult to penetrate, and narrow 
jagged gorges ; and further defended by a sin- 
gle sharp wall-like ridge, having an elevation of 
about twenty-two hundred feet, and lying near- 
250 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

ly parallel with it, at a distance of about twenty 
miles. Or, if you should attempt to reach this 
wall from the south, you would discover that 
from that side also it is hardly less hostile to 
approach. Hence it has stood in its virgin wil- 
derness, a vast isolating and isolated barrier, 
fierce, beautiful, storm-racked, serene ; in win- 
ter, brown and gray, with its naked woods and 
rifts of stone, or mantled in white; in summer, 
green, or of all greens from darkest to palest, 
and touched with all shades of bloom ; in au- 
tumn, colored like the sunset clouds ; curtained 
all the year by exquisite health-giving atmos- 
pheres, lifting itself all the year towards lovely, 
changing skies. 

Understand the position of this natural for- 
tress-line with regard to the area of Kentucky. 
That area has somewhat the shape of an enor- 
mous flat foot, with a disjointed big toe, a 
roughly hacked-off ankle, and a missing heel. 
The sole of this huge foot rests solidly on Ten- 
nessee, the Ohio River trickles across the 
ankle and over the top, the big toe is washed 
entirely off by the Tennessee River, and the 
long-missing heel is to be found in Virginia, 
never having been ceded by that State. Be- 
tween the Kentucky foot and the Virginia 
heel is piled up this immense, bony, grisly 
mass of the Cumberland Mountain, extending 
251 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

some three hundred miles northeast and south* 
west. 

It was through this heel that Kentucky had 
to be peopled. The thin, half-starved, weary 
line of pioneer civilizers had to penetrate it, 
and climb this obstructing mountain wall, as a 
line of travelling ants might climb the wall of 
a castle. In this case only the strongest of the 
ants — the strongest in body, the strongest in 
will — succeeded in getting over and establish- 
ing their colony in the country far beyond. 
Luckily there was an enormous depression in 
the wall, or they might never have scaled it. 
During about half a century this depression 
was the difficult, exhausting entrance -point 
through which the State received the largest 
part of its people, the furniture of their homes, 
and the implements of their civilization; so 
that from the very outset that people repre- 
sented the most striking instance of a survi- 
val of the fittest that may be observed in the 
founding of any American commonwealth. 
The feeblest of the ants could not climb the 
wall ; the idlest of them would not. Observe, 
too, that, once on the other side, it was as hard 
to get back as it had been to get over. That 
is, the Cumberland Mountain kept the little 
ultramontane society isolated. Being isolated, 
it was kept pure - blooded. Being isolated, it 
252 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

developed the spirit and virtues engendered 
by isolation. Hence those traits for which 
Kentuckians were once, and still think them- 
selves, distinguished — passion for self-govern- 
ment, passion for personal independence, brav- 
ery, fortitude, hospitality. On account of this 
mountain barrier the entire civilization of the 
State has had a one-sided development. It has 
become known for pasturage and agriculture, 
whiskey, hemp, tobacco, and fine stock. On 
account of it the great streams of colonization 
flowing from the North towards the South, 
and flowing from the Atlantic seaboard tow- 
ards the West, have divided and passed around 
Kentucky as waters divide and pass around an 
island, uniting again on the farther side. It 
has done the like for the highways of com- 
merce, so that the North has become woven 
to the South and the East woven to the West 
by a connecting tissue of railroads, dropping 
Kentucky out as though it had no vital con- 
nection, as though it were not a controlling 
point of connection, for the four sections of the 
country. Thus keeping out railroads, it has 
kept out manufactures, kept out commerce, 
kept out industrial cities. For three-quarters 
of a century generations of young Kentuck- 
ians have had to seek pursuits of this charac- 
ter in other quarters, thus establishing a con- 
253 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

Stant draining away from the State of its 
resolute, vigorous manhood. Restricting the 
Kentuckians who have remained to an agri- 
cultural type of life, it has brought upon them 
a reputation for lack of enterprise. More than 
all this has that great barrier wall done for 
the history of Kentucky. For, within a hun- 
dred years, the only thing to take possession 
of it, slowly, sluggishly overspreading the re- 
gion of its foot-hills, its vales and fertile slopes 
— the only thing to take possession of it and 
to claim it has been a race of mountaineers, 
an idle, shiftless, ignorant, lawless population, 
whose increasing numbers, pauperism, and 
lawlessness, whose family feuds and clan-like 
vendettas, have for years been steadily gain- 
ing for Kentucky the reputation for having 
one of the worst backwoods populations on the 
continent, or, for that matter, in the world. 

But for the presence of this wall the history 
of the State — indeed the history of the United 
States — would have been profoundly different. 
Long ago, in virtue of its position, Kentucky 
would have knit together, instead of holding 
apart, the North and the South. The cam- 
paigns and the results of the Civil War would 
have been changed ; the Civil War might never 
have taken place. But standing as it has stood, 
it has left Kentucky, near the close of the first 
254 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

century of its existence as a State, with a repu- 
tation somewhat like the shape of its territory 
— unsymmetric, mutilated, and with certain 
parts missing. 

But now consider this wall of the Cumber- 
land Mountain from another point of view. If 
you should stand on the crest at any point 
where it forms the boundary of Kentucky ; or 
south of it, where it extends into Tennessee ; 
or north of it, where it extends into Virginia — 
if you should stand thus and look northward, 
you would look out upon a vast area of coal. 
For many years now it has been known that 
the coal - measure rocks of eastern Kentucky 
comprise about a fourth of the area of the 
State, and are not exceeded in value by those 
of any other State. It has been known that 
this buried solar force exceeds that of Great 
Britain. Later it has become known that the 
Kentucky portion of the great Appalachian 
coal-field contains the largest area of rich can- 
nel - coals yet discovered / these having been 
traced in sixteen counties, and some of them 
excelling by test the famous cannel - coal of 
Great Britain ; later it has become known 
that here is to be found the largest area of 
coking -coal yet discovered, the main coal — 
discovered a few years ago, and named the 
"Elkhorn" — having been traced over sixteen 
255 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

hundred square miles, and equalling American 
standard coke in excellence. 

Further, looking northward, you look out 
upon a region of iron ores, the deposits in 
Kentucky ranking sixth in variety and extent 
among those to be found in all other States, 
and being better disposed for working than any 
except those of Virginia, Tennessee, and Ala- 
bama. For a hundred years now, it should 
be remembered in this connection, iron has 
been smelted in Kentucky, and been an impor- 
tant article of commerce. As early as 1823 it 
was made at Cumberland Gap, and shipped by 
river to markets as remote as New Orleans and 
St. Louis. At an early date, also, it was made 
in a small charcoal forge at Big Creek Gap, 
and was hauled in wagons into central Ken- 
tucky, where it found a ready market for such 
purposes as plough-shares and wagon tires. 

Further, looking northward, t you have ex- 
tending far and wide before you the finest pri- 
meval region of hard-woods in America. 

Suppose, now, that you turn and look from 
this same crest of the Cumberland Mountain 
southward, or towards the Atlantic seaboard. 
In that direction there lie some two hundred 
and fifty thousand square miles of country 
which is practically coalless ; but practically 
coalless, it is incalculably rich in iron ores 
256 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

for the manufacture of iron and steel. You 
look out upon the new industrial empire of 
the United States, with vast and ever - grow- 
ing needs of manufactures, fuel, and railroads. 
That is, for a hundred miles you stand on the 
dividing line of two distinct geological forma- 
tions : to the north, the Appalachian coal-fields; 
to the south, mountains of iron ores ; rearing 
itself between these, this immense barrier wall* 
which creates an unapproachable wilderness 
not only in southeastern Kentucky, but in East 
Tennessee, western Virginia, and western 
North Carolina — the largest extent of country 
in the United States remaining undeveloped. 

But the time had to come when this wilder- 
ness would be approached on all sides, attacked, 
penetrated to the heart. Such wealth of re- 
sources could not be let alone or remain unused. 
As respects the development of the region, the 
industrial problem may be said to have taken 
two forms — the one, the development of the 
coal and iron on opposite sides of the mountains, 
the manufacture of coke and iron and steel, the 
establishment of wood-working industries, and 
the delivery of all products to the markets of 
the land ; second, the bringing together of the 
coals on the north side and the ores through- 
out the south. In this way, then, the Cumber- 
land Mountain no longer offered a barrier 
r 257 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

merely to the civilization of Kentucky, but to 
the solution of the greatest economic problem 
of the age — the cheapest manufacture of iron 
and steel. But before the pressure of this need 
the mountain had to give way and surrender 
its treasures. At any cost of money and labor, 
the time had to come when it would pay to 
bring these coals and ores together. But how 
was this to be done ? The answer was simple : 
it must be done by means of natural water 
gaps and by tunnels through the mountain. 
It is the object of this paper to call attention 
to the way in which the new civilization of the 
South is expected to work at four mountain 
passes, and to point out some of the results 
which are to follow. 



II 



ON the Kentucky side of the mighty wall 
of the Cumberland Mountain, and 
nearly parallel with it, is the sharp 
single wall of Pine Mountain, the westernmost 
ridge of the Alleghany system. For about a 
hundred miles these two gnarled and ancient 
monsters lie crouched side by side, guarding 
between them their hidden stronghold of treas- 
ure — an immense valley of timbers and irons 
and coals. Near the middle point of this in- 
ner wall there occurs a geological fault. The 
mountain falls apart as though cut in twain 
by some heavy downward stroke, showing on 
the faces of the fissure precipitous sides wooded 
to the crests. There is thus formed the cele- 
brated and magnificent pass through which the 
Cumberland River — one of the most beautiful 
in the land — slips silently out of its mountain 
valley, and passes on to the hills and the pla- 
teaus of Kentucky. In the gap there is a space 
for the bed of this river, and on each side of 
259 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

the river space for a roadway and nothing 
more. 

Note the commanding situation of this in- 
ner pass. Travel east along Pine Mountain or 
travel west, and you find no other water gap 
within a hundred miles. Through this that 
thin, toiling line of pioneer civilizers made its 
way, having scaled the great outer Cumberland 
wall some fifteen miles southward. But for this 
single geological fault, by which a water gap of 
the inner mountain was placed opposite a de- 
pression in the outer mountain, thus creating 
a continuous passway through both, the colo- 
nization of Kentucky, difficult enough even with 
this advantage, would have been indefinitely 
delayed, or from this side wholly impossible. 
Through this inner portal was traced in time 
the regular path of the pioneers, afterwards 
known as the Wilderness Road. On account 
of the travel over this road and the controlling 
nature of the site, there was long ago formed 
on the spot a little backwoods settlement, call- 
ing itself Pineville. It consisted of a single 
straggling line of cabins and shanties of logs 
on each side of a roadway, this road being the 
path of the pioneers. In the course of time it 
was made the county-seat. Being the county- 
seat, the way-side village, catching every trav- 
eller on foot or on horse or in wagons, began 
260 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

some years ago to make itself still better known 
as the scene of mountain feuds. The name of 
the town when uttered anywhere in Kentucky 
suggested but one thing — a blot on the civil- 
ization of the State, a mountain fastness where 
the human problem seems most intractable. 
A few such places have done more to foster the 
unfortunate impression which Kentucky has 
made upon the outside world than all the towns 
of the blue-grass country put together. 

Five summers ago, in 1885, in order to pre- 
pare an article for Harper's Magazine on the 
mountain folk of the Cumberland region, I 
made my way towards this mountain town, 
now riding on a buck-board, now on a horse 
whose back was like a board that was too stiff 
to buck. The road I travelled was that great 
highway between Kentucky and the South, 
which at various times within a hundred years 
has been known as the Wilderness Road, or 
the Cumberland Road, or the National Turn- 
pike, or the " Kaintuck Hog Road," as it was 
called by the mountaineers. It is impossible 
to come upon this road without pausing, or to 
write of it without a tribute. It led from Balti- 
more over the mountains of Virginia through 
the great wilderness by Cumberland Gap. All 
roads below Philadelphia converged at this 
gap, just as the buffalo and Indian trails had 
261 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

the river space for a roadway and nothing 
more. 

Note the commanding situation of this in- 
ner pass. Travel east along Pine Mountain or 
travel west, and you find no other water gap 
within a hundred miles. Through this that 
thin, toiling line of pioneer civilizers made its 
way, having scaled the great outer Cumberland 
wall some fifteen miles southward. But for this 
single geological fault, by which a water gap of 
the inner mountain was placed opposite a de- 
pression in the outer mountain, thus creating 
a continuous passway through both, the colo- 
nization of Kentucky, difficult enough even with 
this advantage, would have been indefinitely 
delayed, or from this side wholly impossible. 
Through this inner portal was traced in time 
the regular path of the pioneers, afterwards 
known as the Wilderness Road. On account 
of the travel over this road and the controlling 
nature of the site, there was long ago formed 
on the spot a little backwoods settlement, call- 
ing itself Pineville. It consisted of a single 
straggling line of cabins and shanties of logs 
on each side of a roadway, this road being the 
path of the pioneers. In the course of time it 
was made the county-seat. Being the county- 
seat, the way-side village, catching every trav- 
eller on foot or on horse or in wagons, began 
260 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

some years ago to make itself still better known 
as the scene of mountain feuds. The name of 
the town when uttered anywhere in Kentucky 
suggested but one thing — a blot on the civil- 
ization of the State, a mountain fastness where 
the human problem seems most intractable. 
A few such places have done more to foster the 
unfortunate impression which Kentucky has 
made upon the outside world than all the towns 
of the blue-grass country put together. 

Five summers ago, in 1885, in order to pre- 
pare an article for Harper's Magazine on the 
mountain folk of the Cumberland region, I 
made my way towards this mountain town, 
now riding on a buck-board, now on a horse 
whose back was like a board that was too stiff 
to buck. The road I travelled was that great 
highway between Kentucky and the South, 
which at various times within a hundred years 
has been known as the Wilderness Road, or 
the Cumberland Road, or the National Turn- 
pike, or the " Kaintuck Hog Road," as it was 
called by the mountaineers. It is impossible 
to come upon this road without pausing, or to 
write of it without a tribute. It led from Balti- 
more over the mountains of Virginia through 
the great wilderness by Cumberland Gap. All 
roads below Philadelphia converged at this 
gap, just as the buffalo and Indian trails had 
261 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

earlier converged, and just as many railroads 
are converging now. The improvement of 
this road became in time the pet scheme of 
the State governments of Virginia and Ken- 
tucky. Before the war millions of head of 
stock — horses, hogs, cattle, mules — were driven 
over it to the southern markets ; and thou- 
sands of vehicles, with families and servants 
and trunks, have somehow passed over it, com- 
ing northward into Kentucky, or going south- 
ward on pleasure excursions. During the war 
vast commissary stores passed back and forth, 
following the movement of armies. But de- 
spite all this — despite all that has been done to 
civilize it since Boone traced its course in 1790, 
this honored historic thoroughfare remains to- 
day as it was in the beginning, with all its 
sloughs and sands, its mud and holes, and jut- 
ting ledges of rock and loose bowlders, and 
twists and turns, and general total depravity. 

It is not surprising that when the original 
Kentuckians were settled on the blue - grass 
plateau they sternly set about the making of 
good roads, and to this day remain the best 
road-builders in America. One such road was 
enough. They are said to have been notorious 
for profanity, those who came into Kentucky 
from this side. Naturally. Many were infidels 
— there are roads that make a man lose faith. 
262 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

It is known that the more pious companies of 
them, as they travelled along, would now and 
then give up in despair, sit down, raise a hymn, 
and have prayers before they could go farther. 
Perhaps one of the provocations to homicide 
among the mountain people should be reck- 
oned this road. I have seen two of the mild- 
est of men, after riding over it for a few hours, 
lose their temper and begin to fight — fight their 
horses, fight the flies, fight the cobwebs on 
their noses, fight anything. 

Over this road, then, and towards this town, 
one day, five summers ago, I was picking my 
course, but not without pale human apprehen- 
sions. At that time one did not visit Pineville 
for nothing. When I reached it I found it 
tense with repressed excitement. Only a few 
days previous there had been a murderous af- 
fray in the streets ; the inhabitants had taken 
sides ; a dead-line had been drawn through the 
town, so that those living on either side crossed 
to the other at the risk of their lives ; and there 
was blue murder in the air. I was a stranger ; 
I was innocent ; I was peaceful. But I was 
told that to be a stranger and innocent and 
peaceful did no good. Stopping to eat, I fain 
would have avoided, only it seemed best not to 
be murdered for refusing. All that I now re- 
member of the dinner was a corn-bread that 
263 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

would have made a fine building stone, being 
of an attractive bluish tint, hardening rapidly 
upon exposure to the atmosphere, and being 
susceptible of a high polish. A block of this, 
freshly quarried, I took, and then was up and 
away. But not quickly, for having exchanged 
my horse for another, I found that the latter 
moved off as though at every stop expecting 
to cross the dead-line, and so perish. The im- 
pression of the place was one never to be for- 
gotten, with its squalid hovels, its ragged armed 
men collected suspiciously in little groups, with 
angry, distrustful faces, or peering out from 
behind the ambush of a window. 

A few weeks ago I went again to Pineville, 
this time by means of one of the most extensive 
and powerful railroad systems of the South. 
At the station a 'bus was waiting to take pas- 
sengers to the hotel. The station was on one 
side of the river, the hotel on the other. We 
were driven across a new iron bridge, this be- 
ing but one of four now spanning the river 
formerly crossed at a single ford. At the hotel 
we were received by a porter of metropolitan 
urbanity and self-esteem. Entering the hotel, 
I found it lighted by gas, and full of guests 
from different parts of the United States. In 
the lobby there was a suppressed murmur of 
refined voices coming from groups engaged in 
264 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

serious talk. As by-and-by I sat in a spacious 
dining-room, looking over a freshly printed 
bill of fare, some one in the parlors opposite 
was playing on the piano airs from "Tann- 
hauser " and " Billee Taylor." The dining- 
room was animated by a throng of brisk, tidy, 
white young waiting-girls, some of whom were 
far too pretty to look at except from behind a 
thick napkin ; and presently, to close this ex- 
perience of the new Pineville, there came along 
such inconceivable flannel-cakes and molasses 
that, forgetting industrial and social problems, 
I gave myself up to the enjoyment of a prob- 
lem personal and gastric ; and ere long, having 
spread myself between snowy sheets, I melted 
away, as the butter between the cakes, into 
warm slumber, having first poured over my- 
self a syrup of thanksgiving. 

The next morning I looked out of my win- 
dow upon a long pleasant valley, mountain- 
sheltered, and crossed by the winding Cumber- 
land; here and there cottages of a smart modern 
air already built or building ; in another direc- 
tion, business blocks of brick and stone, graded 
streets and avenues and macadamized roads ; 
and elsewhere, saw and planing mills, coke 
ovens, and other evidences of commercial de- 
velopment. Through the open door of a church 
I saw a Catholic congregation already on its 
265 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

knees, and the worshippers of various Prot- 
estant denominations were looking towards 
their own temples. The old Pineville, happily- 
situated farther down the river, at the very- 
opening of the pass, was rapidly going to ruins. 
The passion for homicide had changed into a 
passion for land speculation. The very man 
on whose account at my former visit the old 
Pineville had been divided into two deadly 
factions, whose name throughout all the re- 
gion once stood for mediaeval violence, had be- 
come a real-estate agent. I was introduced to 
him. 

" Sir," said I, " I don't feel so very much 
afraid of you." 

" Sir," said he, " I don't like to run myself." 

Such, briefly, is the impression made by the 
new Pineville — a new people there, new indus- 
tries, new moral atmosphere, new civilization. 

The explanation of this change is not far to 
seek. By virtue of its commanding position 
as the only inner gateway to the North, this 
pass was the central point of distribution for 
southeastern Kentucky. Flowing into the 
Cumberland, on the north side of the moun- 
tain, is Clear Creek, and on the south side is 
Strait Creek, the two principal streams of this 
region, and supplying water-power and drain- 
age. Tributary to these streams are, say, half 
266 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

a million acres of noble timber land; in the 
mountains around, the best coals, coking and 
domestic ; elsewhere, iron ores, pure brown, 
hematite, and carbonates ; inexhaustible quan- 
tities of limestone, blue-gray sandstone, brick 
clays ; gushing from the mountains, abundant 
streams of healthful freestone water; on the 
northern hill-sides, a deep loam suitable for 
grass and gardens and fruits. Add to this 
that through this water-gap, following the path 
of the Wilderness Road, as the Wilderness Road 
had followed the path of the Indian and the 
buffalo — through this water -gap would have 
to pass all railroads that should connect the 
North and South by means of that historic 
and ancient highway of traffic and travel. 

On the basis of these facts, three summers 
ago a few lawyers in Louisville bought 300 
acres of land near the riotous old town of Pine- 
ville, and in the same summer was organized 
the Pine Mountain Iron and Coal Company, 
which now, however, owns about twenty thou- 
sand acres, with a capital stock of $2,000,000. 
It should be noted that Southern men and 
native capital began this enterprise, and that 
although other stockholders are from Chicago 
and New England, most of the capital remains 
in the State. Development has been rapidly 
carried forward, and over five hundred thou- 
267 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

sand dollars' worth of lots have been sold the 
present year. It is pleasant to dwell upon the 
future that is promised for this place; pleasant 
to hear that over six hundred acres in this 
pleasant valley are to be platted ; that there 
are to be iron - furnaces and electric lights, 
concrete sidewalks and a street railway, more 
bridges, brick - yards, and a high - school ; and 
that the seventy-five coke ovens now in blast 
are to be increased to a thousand. Let it be 
put down to the credit of this vigorous little 
mountain town that it is the first place in 
that region to put Kentucky coke upon the 
market, and create a wide demand for it in 
remote quarters — Cincinnati alone offering to 
take the daily output of five hundred ovens. 

Thus the industrial and human problems 
are beginning to solve themselves side by side 
in the backwoods of Kentucky. You begin 
with coke and end with Christianity. It is the 
boast of Pineville that as soon as it begins to 
make its own iron it can build its houses with- 
out calling on the outside world for an ounce 
of material. 



Ill 



MIDDLESBOROUGH! For a good 
many years in England and through- 
out the world the name has stood as- 
sociated with wealth and commercial greatness 
— the idea of a powerful city near the mouth 
of the Tees, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, 
which has become the principal seat of the 
English iron trade. It is, therefore, curious to 
remember that near the beginning of the cen- 
tury there stood on the site of this powerful 
city four farm-houses and a ruined shrine of 
St. Hilda ; that it took thirty years to bring 
the population up to the number of one hun- 
dred and fifty-four souls ; that the discovery 
of iron-stone, as it seems to be called on that 
side, gave it a boom, as it is called on this ; so 
that ten years ago it had some sixty thousand 
people, its hundred and thirty blast-furnaces, 
besides other industries, and an annual output 
in pig-iron of nearly two million tons. 

But there is now an English Middlesborough 
26g 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

in America, which is already giving to the 
name another significance in the stock market 
of London and among the financial journals 
of the realm ; and if the idea of its founders 
is ever realized, if its present rate of develop- 
ment goes on, it will in time represent as much 
wealth in gold and iron as the older city. 

In the mere idea of the American or Ken- 
tucky Middlesborough — for while it seems to 
be meant for America, it is to be found in 
Kentucky — there is something to arrest atten- 
tion on the score of originality. That the at- 
tention of wealthy commoners, bankers, scien- 
tists, and iron-masters of Great Britain — some 
of them men long engaged in copper, tin, and 
gold mines in the remotest quarters of the 
globe — that the attention of such men should 
be focused on a certain spot in the backwoods 
of Kentucky ; that they should repeatedly send 
over experts to report on the combination of 
mineral and timber wealth ; that on the basis 
of such reports they should form themselves 
into a company called " The American Associ- 
ation, Limited," and purchase 60,000 acres of 
land lying on each side of the Cumberland 
Mountain and around the meeting-point of 
the States of Virginia, Tennessee, and Ken- 
tucky ; that an allied association, called " The 
Middlesborough Town Company," should place 
270 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

here the site of a city, with the idea of making 
it the principal seat of the iron and steel manu- 
facture of the United States ; that they should 
go to work to create this city outright by pour- 
ing in capital for every needed purpose ; that 
they should remove gigantic obstacles in order 
to connect it with 'the national highways of 
commerce ; that they should thus expend some 
twenty million dollars, and let it be known 
that all millions further wanted were forth- 
coming — in the idea of this there is enough to 
make one pause. 

As one cannot ponder the idea of the enter- 
prise without being impressed with its large- 
ness, so one cannot visit the place without 
being struck by the energy with which the 
plan is being wrought at. " It is not sufficient 
to know that this property possesses coal and 
iron of good quality and in considerable quan- 
tities, and that the deposits are situated close 
together, but that they exist in such circum- 
stances as will give us considerable advantages 
over any competitors that either now exist or 
whose existence can in any way be foreseen in 
the near future." Such were the instructions 
of these English capitalists to their agent in 
America. It was characteristic of their race 
and of that method of business by which they 
have become the masters of commerce the 
271 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

world over. In it is the germ of their idea — 
to establish a city for the manufacture of iron 
and steel which, by its wealth of resources, ad- 
vantages of situation, and complete develop- 
ment, should place competition at a disadvan- 
tage, and thus make it impossible. 

It yet remains to be seen whether this can 
be done. Perhaps even the hope of it came 
from an inadequate knowledge of how vast a 
region they had entered, and how incalculable 
its wealth. Perhaps it was too much to expect 
that any one city, however situated, however 
connected, however developed, should be able 
to absorb or even to control the development 
of that region and the distribution of its re- 
sources to all points of the land. It suggests 
the idea of a single woodpecker's hoping to 
carry off the cherries from a tree which a 
noble company of cats and jays and other 
birds were watching; or of a family of squir- 
rels who should take up their abode in a cer- 
tain hole with the idea of eating all the wal- 
nuts in a forest. But, however this may turn 
out, these Englishmen, having once set before 
themselves their aim, have never swerved from 
trying to attain it ; and they are at work de- 
veloping their city with the hope that it will 
bring as great a change in the steel market 
of the United States as a few years ago was 
272 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

made in the iron market by the manufacture 
of Southern iron. 

If you take up in detail the working out of 
their plan of development, it is the same — no 
stint, no drawing back or swerving aside, no 
abatement of the greatest intentions. They 
must have a site for their city — they choose 
for this site what with entire truthfulness 
may be called one of the most strategic moun- 
tain passes in American history. They must 
have a name — they choose that of the principal 
seat of the English iron trade. They must 
have a plant for the manufacture of steel by 
the basic process — they promise it shall be the 
largest in the United States. They want a 
tannery — it shall be the biggest in the world. 
A creek has to be straightened to improve 
drainage — they spend on it a hundred thou- 
sand dollars. They will have their mineral re- 
sources known — they order a car to be built, 
stock it with an exposition of their minerals, 
place it in charge of technical experts, and set 
it going over the country. They take a notion 
to establish a casino, sanitarium, and hotel — it 
must cost over seven hundred thousand dollars. 
The mountain is in their way — that mighty 
wall of the Cumberland Mountain which has 
been in the way of the whole United States for 
over a hundred years — they remove this moun- 
s 273 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

tain; that is, they dig through it a great union 
tunnel, 3750 feet long, beginning in Kentucky, 
running under a corner of Virginia, and com- 
ing out in Tennessee. Had they done nothing 
but this, they would have done enough to en- 
title them to the gratitude of the nation, for it 
is an event of national importance. It brings 
the South and the Atlantic seaboard in con- 
nection with the Ohio Valley and the Lakes ; 
it does more to make the North and the South 
one than any other single thing that has hap- 
pened since the close of the Civil War. 

On the same trip that took me to Pineville 
five summers ago, I rode from that place south- 
ward towards the wall of Cumberland Moun- 
tain. I wished to climb this wall at that vast 
depression in it known as Cumberland Gap. It 
was a tranquil afternoon as I took my course 
over the ancient Wilderness Road through the 
valley of the Yellow Creek. Many a time since 
the memory of that ride has come back to me 
— the forests of magnificent timbers, open 
spaces of cleared land showing the amphithea- 
tre of hills in the purple distance, the winding 
of a shadowy green-banked stream, the tran- 
quil loneliness, the purity of primeval solitude. 
The flitting of a bird between one and the azure 
sky overhead was company, a wild flower bend- 
ing over the water's edge was friendship. Noth- 
274 



v 







FORD ON THE CUMBERLAND 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

ing broke rudely in upon the spirit of the scene 
but here and there a way-side log-cabin, with 
its hopeless squalor, hopeless human inmates. 
If imagination sought relief from loneliness, it 
found it only in conjuring from the dust of the 
road that innumerable caravan of life from 
barbarism to civilization, from the savage to 
the soldier, that has passed hither and thither, 
leaving the wealth of nature unravished, its 
solitude unbroken. 

In the hush of the evening and amid the si- 
lence of eternity, I drew the rein of my tired 
horse on the site of the present town. Before 
me in the mere distance, and outlined against 
the glory of the sky, there towered at last the 
mighty mountain wall, showing the vast depres- 
sion of the gap — the portal to the greatness of 
the commonwealth. Stretching away in every 
direction was a wide plain, broken here and 
there by wooded knolls, and uniting itself with 
graceful curves to the gentle slopes of the sur- 
rounding mountains. The ineffable beauty, the 
vast repose, the overawing majesty of the his- 
toric portal, the memories, the shadows — they 
are never to be forgotten. 

A few weeks ago I reached the same spot as 

the sun was rising, having come thither from 

Pineville by rail. As I stepped from the train 

I saw that the shadowy valley of my remem- 

275 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

brance had been incredibly transformed. Some 
idea of the plan of the new town may be under- 
stood from the fact that Cumberland Avenue 
and Peterborough Avenue, intersecting each 
other near the central point of it, are, when 
completed, to be severally three and a half or 
four and a half miles long. There are twenty 
avenues and thirty streets in all, ranging from 
a hundred feet to sixty feet wide. So long and 
broad and level are the thoroughfares that the 
plan, as projected, suggests comparison with 
Louisville. The valley site itself contains some 
six thousand available acres. 

It should be understood that the company 
owns property on the Tennessee side of the gap, 
and that at the foot of the valley, where a mag- 
nificent spring gushes out, with various other 
mineral springs near by — chalybeate and sul- 
phur — it is proposed to establish a hotel, sani- 
tarium, and casino which shall equal in sump- 
tuousness the most noted European spas. 

As I stood one day in this valley, which has 
already begun to put on the air of civilization, 
with its hotel and railway station and mills and 
pretty homesteads, I saw a sight which seemed 
to me a complete epitome of the past and pres- 
ent tendencies there at work — a summing up 
of the past and a prophecy of the future. Creep- 
ing slowly past the station — so slowly that one 
276 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

knows not what to compare it to unless it be 
the minute-hand on the dial of a clock — creep- 
ing slowly along the Wilderness Road towards 
the ascent of Cumberland Gap, there came a 
mountain wagon, faded and old, with its dirty 
ragged canvas hanging motionless, and drawn 
by a yoke of mountain oxen which seemed to 
be moving in their sleep. On the seat in front, 
with a faded shovel-hat capping his mass of 
coarse tangled hair, and wearing but two other 
garments — a faded shirt and faded breeches — 
sat a faded, pinched, and meagre mountain boy. 
The rope with which he drove his yoke had 
dropped between his clasped knees. He had 
forgotten it ; there was no need to remember 
it. His starved white face was kindled into an 
expression of passionate hunger and excite- 
ment. In one dirty claw-like hand he grasped 
a small paper bag, into the open mouth of which 
he had thrust the other hand, as a miser might 
thrust his into a bag of gold. He had just 
bought, with a few cents, some sweetmeat of 
civilization which he was about for the first time 
to taste. I sat and watched him move away 
and begin the ascent to the pass. Slowly, slow- 
ly, winding now this way and now that across 
the face of the mountain, now hidden, now in 
sight, they went — sleeping oxen, crawling wag- 
on, starved mountain child. At length, as they 
277 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

were about disappearing through the gap, they 
passed behind a column of the white steam from 
a saw-mill that was puffing a short distance in 
front of me ; and, hidden in that steam, they 
disappeared. It was the last of the mountain- 
eers passing away before the breath of civiliza- 
tion. 



IV 



SUPPOSE now that you stand on the south 
side of the great wall of the Cumberland 
Mountain at Cumberland Gap. You have 
come through the splendid tunnel beneath, or 
you have crawled over the summit in the an- 
cient way ; but you stand at the base on the 
Tennessee side in the celebrated Powell's River 
Valley. 

Turn to the left and follow up this valley, 
keeping the mountain on your left. You are 
not the first to take this course : the line of 
human ants used to creep down it in order to 
climb over the wall at the gap. Mark how in- 
accessible this wall is at every other point. 
Mark, also, that as you go two little black par- 
allel iron threads follow you— a railroad, one 
of the greatest systems of the South. All 
along the mountain slope overhanging the 
railroad, iron ore ; beyond the mountain crest, 
timber and coals. Observe, likewise, the feat- 
ures of the land : water abundant, clear, and 
279 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

cold ; fields heavy with corn and oats ; an ever- 
changing panorama of beautiful pictures. The 
farther you go the more rich and prosperous 
the land, the kinder the soil to grains and gar- 
dens and orchards ; bearing its burden of 
timbers — walnut, chestnut, oak, and mighty 
beeches ; lifting to the eye in the near distance 
cultivated hill-sides and fat meadows ; stretch- 
ing away into green and shadowy valley glades ; 
tuneful with swift, crystal streams — a land of 
lovely views. 

Remember well this valley, lying along the 
base of the mountain wall. It has long been 
known as the granary of southwest Virginia 
and east Tennessee ; but in time, in the devel- 
opment of civilization throughout the Appa- 
lachian region, it is expected to become the 
seat of a dense pastoral population, supplying 
the dense industrial population of new mining 
and manufacturing towns with milk, butter, 
eggs, and fruit and vegetables. But for the 
contiguity of such agricultural districts to the 
centres of ores and coals, it would perhaps be 
impossible to establish in these remote spots 
the cities necessary to develop and transport 
their wealth. 

Follow this valley up for a distance of sixty 
miles from Cumberland Gap and there pause, 
for you come to the head of the valley, and 
280 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

you have reached another pass in the moun- 
tain wall. You have passed out of Tennessee 
into Virginia, a short distance from the Ken- 
tucky border, and the mountain wall is no 
longer called the Cumberland : twenty miles 
southwest of where you now are that moun- 
tain divided, sending forth this southern 
prong, called Stone Mountain, and sending 
the rest of itself between the State line of 
Kentucky and Virginia, under the name of 
the Big Black Mountain. Understand, also, 
the general bearings of the spot at which you 
have arrived. It is in that same Alleghany 
system of mountains — the richest metallifer- 
ous region in the world — the northern section 
of which long ago made Pittsburgh ; the south- 
ern section of which has since created Birming- 
ham ; and the middle section of which, where 
you now are, is claimed by expert testimony, 
covering a long period of years and coming 
from different and wholly uninterested author- 
ities, to be the richest of the three. 

This mountain pass not being in Kentucky, 
it might be asked why in a series of articles on 
Kentucky it should deserve a place. The an- 
swer is plain : not because a Kentuckian se- 
lected it as the site of a hoped-for city, or be- 
cause Kentuckians have largely developed it, 
or because Kentuckians largely own it, and 
281 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

have stamped upon it a certain excellent social 
tone ; but for the reason that if the idea of its de- 
velopment is carried out, it will gather towards 
itself a vast net-work of railways from eastern 
Kentucky, the Atlantic seaboard, the South, 
and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, which 
will profoundly affect the inner life of Ken- 
tucky, and change its relations to different 
parts of the Union. 

Big Stone Gap ! It does not sound very big. 
What is it ? At a certain point of this contin- 
uation of Cumberland Mountain, called Stone 
Mountain, the main fork of Powell's River has 
in the course of ages worn itself a way down 
to a practical railroad pass at water-level, thus 
opening connection between the coking coal 
on the north and the iron ores on the south of 
the mountain. No pass that I have ever seen 
— except those made by the Doe River in the 
Cranberry region of North Carolina — has its 
wild, enrapturing loveliness ; towering above 
on each side are the mountain walls, ancient 
and gray and rudely disordered ; at every 
coign of vantage in these, grasping their pre- 
cipitous buttresses, as the claw of a great eagle 
might grasp the uttermost brow of a cliff, 
enormous trees above trees, and amid the trees 
a green lace-work of undergrowth. Below, in 
a narrow, winding channel piled high with 
282 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

bowlders, with jutting rocks and sluice - like 
fissures — below and against these the river 
hurls itself, foaming, roaring, whirling, a long 
cascade of white or lucent water. This is Big 
Stone Gap, and the valley into which the river 
pours its full strong current is the site of the 
town. A lofty valley it is, having an elevation 
of 1600 feet above the sea, with mountains gir- 
dling it that rise to the height of 4000 — a val- 
ley the surface of which gently rolls and slopes 
towards these encircling bases with constant 
relief to the eye, and spacious enough, with 
those opening into it, to hold a city of the pop- 
ulation of New York. 

This mountain pass, lying in the heart of this 
reserved wilderness of timbers, coals, and ores, 
has always had its slender thread of local his- 
tory. It was from a time immemorial a buffalo 
and Indian trail, leading to the head-waters of 
the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers ; during 
the Civil War it played its part in certain local 
military exploits and personal adventures of a 
quixotian flavor ; and of old the rich farmers 
of Lee County used to drive their cattle through 
it to fatten on the pea- vine and blue-grass grow- 
ing thick on the neighboring mountain tops. 
But in the last twenty-five years — that quar- 
ter of the century which has developed in the 
United States an ever-growing need of iron and 
283 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

steel, of hard-woods, and of all varieties of coal ; 
a period which has seen one after another of the 
reserve timber regions of the country thinned 
and exhausted — during the past twenty -five 
years attention has been turned more and 
more towards the forests and the coal-fields in 
the region occupied by the south Alleghany 
Mountain system. 

It was not enough to know that at Big Stone 
Gap there is a water-gap admitting the passage 
of a railway on each side at water-level, and 
connecting contiguous workable coals with 
ores ; not enough repeatedly to test the abun- 
dance, variety, and purity of both of these ; not 
enough to know that a short distance off a sin- 
gle vertical section of coal-measure rocks has a 
thickness above drainage level of 2500 feet, the 
thickest in the entire Appalachian coal-field 
from Pennsylvania to Alabama ; not enough 
that from this point, by available railroad to 
the Bessemer steel ores in the Cranberry dis- 
trict of North Carolina, it is the shortest dis- 
tance in the known world separating such coke 
and such ores ; not enough that there are here 
superabundant limestone and water, the south 
fork of Powell's River winding about the val- 
ley, a full, bold current, and a few miles from 
the town the head-waters of this same river 
having a fall of 700 feet ; not enough that near 
284 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

by is a rich agricultural region to supply need- 
ed markets, and that the valley itself has a 
natural drainage, delightful climate, and ideal 
beauty — all this was not enough. It had to be 
known that the great water-gap through the 
mountain at this point, by virtue of its position 
and by virtue of its relation to other passes and 
valleys leading to it, necessitated, sooner or 
later, a concentration here of railroad lines for 
the gathering, the development, and the distri- 
bution of its resources. 

From every imaginable point of view a place 
like this is subject to unsparing test before it 
is finally fixed upon as a town site and enters 
upon a process of development. Nothing would 
better illustrate the tremendous power with 
which the new South, hand in hand with a 
new North, works with brains and capital and 
science. A few years ago this place was seventy 
miles from the nearest railroad. That road 
has since been built to it from the south ; a 
second is approaching it from* a distance of a 
hundred and twenty miles on the west ; a third 
from the east ; and when the last two come to- 
gether this point will be on a great east and 
west trunk line, connecting the Ohio and Mis- 
sissippi valleys with the Atlantic seaboard. 
Moreover, the Legislature of Kentucky has just 
passed an act incorporating the Inter-State 
285 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

Tunnel Railroad Company, and empowering it 
to build an inter-State double-track highway 
from the head-waters of the Cumberland and 
Kentucky rivers to Big Stone Gap, tunnelling 
both the Black and Cumberland Mountains, and 
affording a passway north and south for the 
several railways of eastern Kentucky already 
heading towards this point. The plan embraces 
two double-track toll tunnels, with double-track 
approaches between and on each side of the 
tunnel, to be owned and controlled by a stock 
company which shall allow all railroads to pass 
on the payment of toll. If this enterprise, in- 
volving the cost of over two million dollars, is 
carried out, the railroad problem at Big Stone 
Gap, and with it the problem of developing 
the mineral wealth of southwest Virginia and 
southeast Kentucky, would seem to be prac- 
tically solved. 

That so many railroads should be approach- 
ing this point from so many different directions 
seems to lift it at once to a position of extraor- 
dinary importance. 

But it is only a few months since the nearest 
one reached there ; and, since little could be 
done towards development otherwise, at Big 
Stone Gap one sees the process of town-making 
at an earlier stage than at Middlesborough. 
Still, there are under construction water-works, 
286 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

from the pure mountain river, at an elevation 
of 400 feet, six miles from town, that will sup- 
ply daily 2,500,000 gallons of water ; two iron- 
furnaces of a hundred tons daily capacity ; an 
electric-light plant, starting with fifty street 
arc-lights, and 750 incandescent burners for 
residences, and a colossal hotel of 300 rooms. 
These may be taken as evidences of the vast 
scale on which development is to be carried for- 
ward, to say nothing of a steam street railway, 
belt line, lumber and brick and finishing plants, 
union depot, and a coke plant modelled after 
that at Connellsville. And on the whole it 
may be said that already over a million dollars' 
worth of real estate has been sold, and that 
eight land, coal, and iron development com- 
panies have centred here the development of 
properties aggregating millions in value. 

It is a peculiarity of these industrial towns 
thus being founded in one of the most beauti- 
ful mountain regions of the land that they shall 
not merely be industrial towns. They aim at 
becoming cities or homes for the best of peo- 
ple ; fresh centres to which shall be brought 
the newest elements of civilization from the 
North and South ; retreats for jaded pleasure- 
seekers ; asylums for invalids. And therefore 
they are laid out for amenities and beauty as 
well as industry — with an eye to using the ex- 
287 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

quisite mountain flora and park -like forests, 
the natural boulevards along their water- 
courses, and the natural roadways to vistas 
of enchanting mountain scenery. What is to 
be done at Middlesborough will not be forgot- 
ten. At Big Stone Gap, in furtherance of this 
idea, there has been formed a Mountain Park 
Association, which has bought some three 
thousand acres of summit land a few miles 
from the town, with the idea of making it a 
game preserve and shooting park, adorned 
with a rambling club-house in the Swiss style 
of architecture. In this preserve is High Knob, 
perhaps the highest mountain in the Alleghany 
range, being over four thousand feet above 
sea-level, the broad summit of which is car- 
peted with blue-grass and white clover in the 
midst of magnificent forest growth. 



V 



SUPPOSE once more that you stand out- 
side the Cumberland or Stone Mountain 
at the gap. Now turn and follow down 
the beautiful Powell's Valley, retracing your 
course to Cumberland Gap. Pass this, con- 
tinuing down the same valley, and keeping on 
your right the same parallel mountain wall. 
Mark once more how inaccessible it is at every 
point. Mark once more the rich land and pros- 
perous tillage. Having gone about thirty miles 
beyond Cumberland Gap, pause again. You 
have come to another pass — another remarkable 
gateway. You have travelled out of Kentucky 
into Tennessee, and the Cumberland Mountain 
has changed its name and become Walden's 
Mountain, distant some fifteen miles from the 
Kentucky State line. 

It is necessary once more to define topo- 
graphical bearings. Running northeast and 
southwest is this Cumberland Mountain, hav- 
ing an elevation of from twenty-five hundred 
t 289 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

to three thousand feet. Almost parallel with 
it, from ten to twenty miles away, and having 
an elevation of about two thousand feet, lies 
Pine Mountain, in Kentucky. In the outer or 
Cumberland Mountain it has now been seen 
that there are three remarkable gaps : Big 
Stone Gap on the east, where Powell's River 
cuts through Stone Mountain ; Cumberland 
Gap intermediate, which is not a water -gap, 
but a depression in the mountain ; and Big 
Creek Gap in the west, where Big Creek cuts 
through Walden's Mountain — the last being 
about forty miles distant from the second, 
about ninety from the first. Now observe that 
in Pine Mountain there are three water-gaps 
having a striking relation to the gaps in the 
Cumberland — that is, behind Cumberland Gap 
is the pass at Pineville ; behind Big Stone Gap 
and beyond it at the end of the mountain are 
the Breaks of Sandy ; and behind Big Creek 
Gap are the Narrows, a natural water-gap con- 
necting Tennessee with Kentucky. 

But it has been seen that the English have 
had to tunnel Cumberland Mountain at Mid- 
dlesborough in order to open the valley between 
Pine and Cumberland mountains to railroad 
connections with the south. It has also been 
seen that at Big Stone Gap it has been found 
necessary to plan for a vast tunnel under Big 
290 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

Black Mountain, and also under Pine Moun- 
tain, in order to establish north and south con- 
nections for railroads, and control the devel- 
opment of southeast Kentucky and southwest 
Virginia. But now mark the advantage of the 
situation at Big Creek Gap: a water -gap at 
railroad level giving entrance from the south, 
and seventeen miles distant a corresponding 
water -gap at railroad level giving exit from 
the south and entrance from the north. There 
is thus afforded a double natural gateway at 
this point, and at this point alone — an inesti- 
mable advantage. Here, then, is discovered a 
third district centre in Cumberland Mountain 
where the new industrial civilization of the 
South is expected to work. All the general 
conditions elsewhere stated are here found 
present — timbers, coals, and ores, limestone, 
granite, water, scenery, climate, flora ; the 
beauty is the same, the wealth not less. 

With a view to development, a company 
has bought up and owns in fee 20,000 acres 
of coal lands and some seven thousand of 
iron ore in the valley and along the foot- 
hills on the southern slope of the mountain. 
They have selected and platted as a town 
site over sixteen hundred acres of beautiful 
valley land, lying on both sides of Big Creek 
where it cuts through the mountain, 1200 
291 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

feet above the sea - level. But here again 
one comes upon the process of town-making 
at a still earlier stage of development. That 
is, the town exists only on paper, and im- 
provement has not yet begun. Taken now, 
it is in the stage that Middlesborough, or Big 
Stone Gap, was once in. So that it should 
not be thought any the less real because it 
is rudimentary or embryonic. A glance at 
the wealth tributary to this point will soon 
dispel doubt that here in the future, as at the 
other strategic mountain passes of the Cum- 
berland, is to be established an important 
town. 

Only consider that the entire 20,000 acres 
owned by the Big Creek Gap Company are 
underlain by coal, and that the high mountains 
between the Pine and Cumberland contain 
vertical sections of greater thickness of coal- 
measure rocks than are to be found anywhere 
else in the vast Appalachian field ; that Wal- 
nut Mountain, on the land of the company — 
the western continuation of the Black Moun- 
tain and the Log Mountain of Kentucky — is 
3300 feet above sea, and has 2000 feet of coal- 
measures above drainage ; and that already 
there has been developed the existence of six 
coals of workable thickness above drainage 
level, five of them underlying the entire 20,000 
292 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

acres, except where small portions have been 
cut away by the streams. 

. The lowest coal above drainage — the Sharpe 
■ — presents an outcrop about twenty feet above 
the bed of the stream, and underlies the entire 
purchase. It has long been celebrated for 
domestic use in the locality. An entry driven 
in about sixty feet shows a twelve-inch cannel- 
coal with a five-inch soft shale, burning with a 
brilliant flame, and much used in Powell's 
Valley ; also a bituminous coal of forty-three- 
inch thickness, having a firm roof, cheaply min- 
able, and yielding a coke of over 93 per cent, 
pure carbon, 

The next coal above is a cannel-coal having 
an outcrop on the Middle Fork of Big Creek 
of thirty-six inches, and on the north slope of 
the mountains, six miles off, of thirty-eight 
inches, showing a persistent bed throughout. 

Above this is the Douglass coal, an entry of 
forty feet into which shows a thickness of fifty 
inches, with a good roof, and on the northern 
slope of the mountains, at Cumberland River, 
a thickness of sixty inches. This is a gas coal 
of great excellence, yielding also a coke, good, 
but high in sulphur. Above the Douglass 
is an unexplored section of great thickness, 
showing coal stains and coals exposed, but un- 
developed. 

293 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

The uppermost coal discovered, and the high- 
est opened in Tennessee — the Walnut Moun- 
tain coal — is a coking variety of superior qual- 
ity, fifty-eight inches thick, and, though lying- 
near the top of the mountain, protected by a 
sandstone roof. It is minable at a low cost, 
admirable for gas, and is here found underly- 
ing some two thousand acres. 

As to the wealth of iron ores, it has been 
said that the company owns about seven thou- 
sand acres in the valley and along the southern 
slopes of Cumberland Mountain. There is a 
continuous outcrop of the soft red fossilifer- 
ous, or Clinton, iron ore, ten miles long, no- 
where at various outcrops less than sixty inches 
thick, of exceptional richness and purity, well 
located for cheap mining, and adjacent to the 
coal-beds. Indeed, where it crosses Big Creek 
at the gap, it is only a mile from the coking 
coal. Lying from one to two hundred feet 
above the drainage level of the valley, where 
a railroad is to be constructed, and parallel 
to this road at a distance of a few hundred 
feet, this ore can be put on cars and delivered 
to the furnaces of Big Creek Gap at an esti- 
mated cost of a dollar a ton. Of red ore two 
beds are known to be present. 

Parallel and near to the red fossiliferous, 
there has been developed along the base of 
294 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

Cumberland Mountain a superior brown ore, 
the Limonite — the same as that used in the 
Low Moor, Longdale, and other furnaces of the 
Clifton Forge district. This — the Oriskany — 
has been traced to within ten miles of the 
company's lands, and there is every reason to 
believe that it will be developed on them. At 
the beginning of this article it was stated that 
iron of superior quality was formerly made at 
Big Creek Gap, and found a ready market 
throughout central Kentucky. 

Parallel with the ore and easily quarriable 
is the subcarboniferous limestone, one thick 
stratum of which contains 98 per cent, of car- 
bonate of lime ; so that, with liberal allowance 
for the cost of crude material, interest, wear 
and tear, it is estimated that iron can here be 
made at as low a cost as anywhere in the 
United States, and that furnaces will have an 
advantage in freight in reaching the markets of 
the Ohio Valley and the farther South. More- 
over, the various timbers of this region attain 
a perfection seldom equalled, and by a little 
clearing out of the stream, logs can be floated 
at flood tides to the Clinch and Tennessee 
rivers. To-day mills are shipping these tim- 
bers from Boston to the Rocky Mountains. 

Situated in one of the most beautiful of 
valleys, 1200 feet above sea-level, surrounded 
295 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

by park-like forests and fertile valley lands, 
having an abundance of pure water and per- 
fect drainage, with iron ore only a mile from 
coke, and a double water-gap giving easy pas- 
sage for railroads, Big Creek Gap develops 
peculiar strength and possibilities of impor- 
tance, when its relation is shown to those cities 
which will be its natural markets, and to the 
systems of railroads of which it will be the 
inevitable outlet. Within twenty miles of it 
lie three of the greatest railroad systems of 
the South. It is but thirty - eight miles from 
Knoxville, and eight miles of low-grade road, 
through a fertile blue-grass valley, peopled by 
intelligent, prosperous farmers, will put it in 
connection with magnetic and specular ores for 
the making of steel, or with the mountain of 
Bessemer ore at Cranberry. Its coke is about 
three hundred miles nearer to the Sheffield 
and Decatur furnaces than the Pocahontas 
coke, which is now being shipped to them. It 
is nearer St. Louis and Chicago than their 
present sources of supply. It is the nearest 
point to the great coaling-station for steam- 
ships now building at Brunswick. And it is 
one of the nearest bases of supply for Pensa- 
cola, which in turn is the nearest port of sup- 
ply for Central and South America. 

No element of wealth or advantage of posi- 
296 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

tion seems lacking to make this place one of 
the controlling points of that vast commercial 
movement which is binding the North and the 
South together, and changing the relation of 
Kentucky to both, by making it the great high- 
way of railway connection, the fresh centre of 
manufacture and distribution, and the lasting 
fountain-head of mineral supply. 



VI 



a TTENTION is thus briefly directed to 
/\ that line of towns which are springing 
■* *■ up, or will in time spring up, in the moun- 
tain passes of the Cumberland, and are making 
the backwoods of Kentucky the fore-front of a 
new civilization. Through these three passes 
in the outer wall of Cumberland Mountain, 
and through that pass at Pineville in the inner 
wall behind Cumberland Gap — through these 
four it is believed that there must stream the 
railroads carrying to the South its timbers and 
coals ; to the North its timbers, coal, and iron ; 
and carrying to both from these towns, as in- 
dependent centres of manufacture, all those 
products the crude materials of which exist in 
economic combinations on the spot. 

It is idle to say that all these places cannot 
become important. The competition will be 
keen, and the fittest will survive ; but all these 
are fit to survive, each having advantages of 
its own. Big Stone Gap lies so much nearer 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

the East and the Atlantic seaboard ; Big 
Creek Gap so much nearer the West and the 
Ohio and Mississippi valleys and the Lakes ; 
Cumberland Gap and Pineville so much near- 
er an intermediate region. 

But as the writer has stated, it is the human, 
not the industrial, problem to be solved by 
this development that possessed for him the 
main interest. One seems to see in the per- 
foration and breaking up of Cumberland 
Mountain an event as decisive of the destiny 
of Kentucky as though the vast wall had fall- 
en, destroying the isolation of the State, bring- 
ing into it the new, and letting the old be 
scattered until it is lost. But while there is no 
space here to deal with those changes that are 
rapidly passing over Kentucky life and obliter- 
ating old manners and customs, old types of 
character and ideals of life, old virtues and 
graces as well as old vices and horrors — there 
is a special topic too closely connected with 
the foregoing facts not to be considered : the 
effect of this development upon the Kentucky 
mountaineers. 

The buying up of the mountain lands has 
unsettled a large part of these people. Al- 
ready there has been formed among them a 
class of tenants paying rent and living in their 
old homes. But in the main there are three 
299 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

movements among them. Some desert the 
mountains altogether, and descend to the Blue- 
grass Region with a passion for farming. On 
county-court days in blue-grass towns it has 
been possible of late to notice this peculiar type 
mingling in the market-places with the tradi- 
tional type of blue-grass farmer. There is thus 
going on, especially along the border counties, 
a quiet interfusion of the two human elements 
of the Kentucky highiander and the Kentucky 
lowlander, so long distinct in blood, physique, 
history, and ideas of life. To less extent, the 
mountaineers go farther west, beginning life 
again beyond the Mississippi. 

A second general tendency among them is 
to be absorbed by the civilization that is 
springing up in the mountains. They flock to 
these towns, keep store, are shrewd and active 
speculators in real estate, and successful de- 
velopers of small capital. The first business 
house put up in the new Pineville was built by 
a mountaineer. 

But the third, and, as far as can be learned, 
the most general movement among them is to 
retire at the approach of civilization to remot- 
er regions of the mountains, where they may 
live without criticism or observation their he- 
reditary, squalid, unambitious, stationary life. 
But to these retreats they must in time be 
300 



Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 

followed, therefrom dislodged, and again set 
going. Thus a whole race of people are being 
scattered, absorbed, civilized. You may go far 
before you will find a fact so full of conse- 
quences to the future of the State. 

Within a few years the commonwealth of 
Kentucky will be a hundred years old. All in 
all, it would seem that with the close of its 
first century the old Kentucky passes away ; 
and that the second century will bring in a 
new Kentucky — new in many ways, but new 
most of all on account of the civilization of the 
Cumberland. 



THE END 



By JAMES LANE ALLEN 



A KENTUCKY CARDINAL. Illustrated by Albert 
E. Sterner. New Edition. 16mo, Cloth, Orna- 
mental, $1 00 ; Half Calf, $2 00. 

The portrayal of nature alone would give the book high 
rank, but the story sets the poem to music. — Chicago limes. 

AFTERMATH. Part Second of "A Kentucky Car- 
dinal." New Edition. lGmo, Cloth, Ornamental, 
$1 00 ; Half Calf, $2 00. 

A slender stream of tender and delicate imagining, filtered 
through prose which is almost poetry. — New York Observer. 

THE BLUE -GRASS REGION OF KENTUCKY, 

and Other Kentucky Articles. New Edition. Illus- 
trated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50. 

We are indebted to Mr. James Lane Allen for the first 
adequate treatment of an interesting subject — adequate both 
in respect of knowledge and of literary skill — in the book 
entitled "The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky." — New York 
Sun. 

FLUTE AND VIOLIN, and Other Kentucky Tales 
and Romances. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Orna- 
mental, $1 50 ; Silk Binding, $2 25. 

The stories of this volume are fiction of high artistic value 
— fiction to be read and remembered as something rare, fine, 
and deeply touching. — New York Independent. 



NEW YORK AND LONDON: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers 

&T Any of the above works mil be sent by mail, postage 
prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, 
on receipt of thejmce. 



By MARY E. WILKINS 



SILENCE, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 16mo, Clotb,Oiv 

namental, $1 25. 
JEROME, A POOR MAN. A Novel. Illustrated. 16mo, 

Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50. 
MADELON. A Novel. lumo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25. 
PEMBROKE. A Novel. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, Orna. 

mental, $1 50. 
JANE FIELD. A Novel. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, Orna- 
mental, $1 25. 
A NEW ENGLAND NUN, and Other Stories. lGmo, Cloth, 

Ornamental. $1 25. 
A HUMBLE ROMANCE, and Other Stories. lGmo, Cloth, 

Ornamental, $1 25. 
YOUNG LUCRETIA, and Other Stories. Illustrated. Post 

8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25. 
GILES COREY, YEOMAN. A Play. Illustrated. 32mo, 

Cloth, Ornamental, 50 cents. 

Mary E. Willcins writes of New England country life, analyzes New 
England country character, with the skill and deftness of one who 
knows it through and through, and yet never forgets that, while real- 
istic, she is first and last an artist. — Boston Advertiser. 

MissWilkins has attained an eminent position among her literary 
contemporaries as one of the most careful, natural, and effective 
writers of brief dramatic incident. Few surpass her in expressing the 
homely pathos of the poor and ignorant, while the humor of her stories 
is quiet, pervasive, and suggestive.— Philadelphia Press. 

It takes just such distinguished literary art as Mary E. Wilkins pos- 
sesses to give an episode of New England its soul, pathos, and poetry. 
— N. Y. Times. 

The pathos of New England life, its intensities of repressed feeling, 
its homely tragedies, and its tender humor, have never been better 
told than by Mary E. Wilkins. — Boston Courier. 

The simplicity, purity, and quaintness of these stories set them apart 
in a niche of distinction where they have no rivals.— Literary World, 
Boston. 

The charm of Miss Wilkins's stories is in her intimate acquaintance 
and comprehension of humble life, and the sweet human interest she 
feels and makes her readers partake of, in the simple, common, homely 
people she draws. — Springfitid Republican. 



HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

/gsfAny of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any 

part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. 



9 6 6^ 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proce 
Neutralizing Agent: Magnes.um Cxide 

Trea,msntDate AU6 1998 



n] r jr fPflCl 




PRESERVATION I twiw^i 
111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



